Backup Windows VM

J

JohnCa

Junior Member
I have recently transferred to an iMAC from a W7 machine, and transferred that machine to a Paralels VM. That works reasonably well, but I am getting worried about backing up the Windows VM as it holds most of my data. Can anyone recommend their best approach for this?

I have been told that using Time Machine will do this, but something seems to be odd about that as I cannot seem to find the VM amongst the Time Machine timeline - can anyone suggest what to do? Further, I have used less than 200 GB of storage on the MAC (including, I assume the Winows VM data), but the 2 TB storage for Time Machine has 1.7 TB already used and it can only store less than a weeks worth of data - not much good as a backup. My data change is modest, and in my Windows machine that 2 TB was more than enough for many years backup. So 2TB ought to be more than generous

So - what can I do to make sure that I keep a reasonable amount of data backed up, and feel confident that it is working?
 
Hi JohnCa,

One of the ways to back up your Virtual Machine(s) is to use the Mac built-in Time Machine Utility; it's one of the easiest ways to keep your computer safe. When backing up the Virtual Machine, it will only backup the recent changes (the latest snapshot), but not the whole virtual hard drive. Thus, the backup process will take less time and use less space on your Time Machine storage device.

Please follow the steps suggested at http://kb.parallels.com/8827 to back up Virtual Machine with Time machine and follow http://kb.parallels.com/115052 to know more about Optimizing Time Machine back up's.
 
Ram@Parallels - I am using Time Machine and I have concerns about it, what it is doing and how it is doing it. I have an iMAC with 250 GB of hard disk, with 55 GB available. Thus I have consumed some 200GB. Of which, a significant amount is the W7 Parallels VM.

I have a 2 TB drive as back up for Time Machine, and it is showing 320 GB available - thus using 1.7 TB to back up 200GB. This is a enormous multiplier for something that is supposed to be carrying out a differential back up approach, so I am concerned what it is doing. It seems to me to be a triumph of style over substance.

I would rather have a more conventional approach to backup where an application backs up everything, and then copies a delta until a defined time when it again backs up everything.

As a linked question - are the W7 files held as a separate set on the OSX filing system, so will be backed up as part of normal backup?
 
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