Best practices for Parallels VM backups with Time Machine

Hi,

I'm currently setting up a backup solution with Time Machine and try to figure out how to backup Parallels VMs correctly. I've read through several KB articles, forum threads and articles and want to share my thoughts with you and ask for your help.

The main problem with VM backup is, that Time Machine sees the VM's hard drive as one single file and backups it completely every time it changes in any way. With heavy VM usage and Time Machine's hourly backup plan, my external HDD get's filled very quickly with copies of my VM. To reduce disk usage, Parallels has a feature called Smart Guard, which integrates with Time Machine and creates a snapshot every 48 hours. After an initial backup, only the snapshots are saved by Time Machine.

So far so good. In case of disk failure, I should theoretically be able to restore the VM to any snapshot using the initial backup and the snapshots. As far as I know the snapshots are incremental and depend on their predecessors. What happens when my external drive gets full and Time Machine deletes the oldest snapshot? Doesn't that mean that all the other snapshots are useless because they are only incremental backups of the first snapshot?

Are there any other ways to backup VMs without wasting too much space? I've tried splitting up the VM's hard drive into 2GB files, performed a backup, installed Windows updates on the VM, and backed up again. Unfortunately the second backup was as big as the first backup.

How do you backup your VMs?

Thank you for your help!

Best regards

Felix

 

I have used Mac Time Machine to backup my parallels 9 VM. I have installed a new SSD and have tried using time machine to restore my Parallels 9 VM and it worked fine. But the applications that are in my TM PVM backup did not restore. I needed the applications and the data files associated with them to restore. I can reinstall the software easy enough but I needed the data within the application files. Is there something I am missing to be able to restore the application and its associated data from TM?