One of my Windows VM is a few hundred gigabytes (and too small at that!). If I do not exclude it from Time Machine, then Time Machine wants to back up the whole thing every time I do any work in the VM. It looks like the disk is not split (I have some snapshots so it is inconvenient to change that.)
What are some recommendations on how to efficiently back up the VM in a way that gets picked up by Time Machine, but does not require backing up the entire VM as files are changed?
Ideally I would like to be able to point a product at a BootCamp-based VM, back up to Mac file(s) in a way that stores system information and used files (instead of needing to clone the virtual disk block by block), and do incremental backups from time to time, and restore if necessary. One desire would be to restore if I expand my Bootcamp partition (which typically requires destroying the partitions on the built-in drive.) But even ignoring Bootcamp, incremental backups of files from inside a Windows VM, written to Mac files... in a way that a restore didn't require me to go through a complete Windows installation just to get to the point of being able to run software inside Windows to run a restore from files stored on the Mac.
Would it be too much to hope for a program that could run outside of a Windows VM but able to back up my Windows VMs incrementally... so that I do not have to start up each of the VMs to run a backup program inside it?
Note: unless Acronis has changed drastically since 2017, it is not able to do these things... not even close.
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