Best way to use Time Machine for backup?

Since upgrading to Lion OS on my iMac, Time Machine seems to run forever, in that the hourly backup
takes longer than 1 hour! Am I alone with this issue?

I have had to close Windows and exit PD to allow the hourly backup to complete.
It seems that it wants to backup the entire VM (about 46G) every hour if I allow Time Machine to run as it did before Lion upgrade - ie just let it do its thing while I carry on working with PD and windows running.

Of course I could just exclude the VM from backup, but then I have to find another solution for the windows files.

What is the right way to set thinks up so that the windows VM part is backed up incrementally along with the MAC OS part?

Thanks for any help!

 

No, I've got the same problem here on a clean install of PD for Mac.

Same here. Very annoying to backup 12-14GB (full size of my VM) every hour via WLAN.

I just bought Parallels because of the feature with TimeMachine.
(I used VMware Fusion before..)
It is very frustrating!

That would be so kind to know that. ;-)

My configuration of the virtual machine under "Backup" is the following:
SmartGuard: Optimized for TimeMachine


Also: Thanks for your help!