I have a VM that's stored on a secondary drive on my Mac (an external RAID drive connected via Thunderbolt), i.e. not on the disk which includes macOS and my account home folder. So my Documents folder doesn't include the .pvm file for this particular VM (although oddly enough it DOES include a tiny .pvm file with the same name as this VM, but not modified since 2017.) I back up my Mac with Time Machine, and the VM in question has the SmartGuard box checked along with "Optimize for Time Machine". If I look at Time Machine, the external RAID drive is EXCLUDED from Time Machine backups - I think that was done by default by macOS because it's technically a "removable" drive.
Am I correct in assuming that the VM is not actually being backed up by Time Machine, and that I need to remove the exclusion for the external RAID drive in order for the VM to be properly backed up by Time Machine? Also, will Time Machine still only back up the latest snapshot of the VM even though the VM is stored on an external "removable" drive? My guess is that this happens because the base HDD image and other snapshots don't get modified but the latest snapshot does, so Time Machine only backs up what's changed and that's the latest snapshot - is my reasoning correct here?
Thanks!
Am I correct in assuming that the VM is not actually being backed up by Time Machine, and that I need to remove the exclusion for the external RAID drive in order for the VM to be properly backed up by Time Machine? Also, will Time Machine still only back up the latest snapshot of the VM even though the VM is stored on an external "removable" drive? My guess is that this happens because the base HDD image and other snapshots don't get modified but the latest snapshot does, so Time Machine only backs up what's changed and that's the latest snapshot - is my reasoning correct here?
Thanks!