Time Machine and Parallels

Sparse Bundle

If you place your Parallels image on a sparse bundle, it will be able to get backed up by time machine appropriately, but I have no idea what it would do to performance on a virtual machine.

I have used it with entourage and it works very well, but that is on an 8 core mac pro.

Anyway, it would be pretty easy to do and test, so it is worth a shot.

Open Disk utility, hit the "new image" button.
Set your Volume Size to larger than the size of your virtual hard drive
Set your image format to "sparse bundle disk image"
Click create

Copy the parallels files to the new image, edit the virtual machine settings, point the hard drive to the copy, and see how it goes.

If it doesn't work, no harm done, change the virtual machine back to the original hard drive, and delete the sparse bundle.

here are more detailed instructions for entourage that could be helpful if you need more details
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080605115101581

 

Various permutations are possible, but what works well is to use your Windows C: drive for the OS and programs only. If your VM becomes corrupted, it can be restored (albeit with some pain). For all data, create a folder in (say) your Mac documents folder, and share it in Windows as a network drive. Then you can exclude your C: drive from Time Machine backup, while all your data will be safely backed up.

 

I do something similar dMac786

I use a "NAS" for all my storage and as you said only install apps on the vm.

 

This is the parallels you need to exclude from backup under Time Machine options. It took me three days to figure out. My backups were around 24gb every time, now they're a resonalble 500mb.

 

Time-Machine Exclude

I'm not certain that I'm interpreting this (the disk image file to exclude from Time Machine and backup by other means).

In particular, I think that by "user/" you mean what shows up in the TM exclude dialog as "Users/mr88cet/", mr88cet being my userID?

If so, I don't see anything in that folder that looks like a disk-image file, and upon excluding it, TM is still backing up the big 25GB file.