Best way to back up virtual machines

J

jasonjasonjason

Bit poster
The user guide has a short section on making backups, but I am hoping others can provide more detail.

If I back up all of the files in ~/Library/Parallels/ to another computer when Parallels is off, am I backing up everything I need to restore if I had to reinstall the computer that runs parallels?

If I only want to back up data for a specific VM, can I just back up the files in ~/Library/Parallels/VirtualMachineName? Can I exclude the Snapshots directory and Snapshots.xml and still be able to recover the current state of the machine?

What's the best way to automate the backup of the virtual machine while the guest OS is running? Is that possible?

Thanks!
 
Have you tried to rebuild a VM with only a clone? That is to say, create a clone then delete or move to a safe place the original, then try to recover using the clone. A clone, I think, is not at all the same thing as a full backup, but I can be educated.
 
I simply copy the files in:

/usr/Library/Parallels/WinXP

(where user is my username) to a firewire disk. The copies take about 12 minutes as my VM is around 20g in size.

But it works. I have successfully restored from these files when I have botched something up in windows.

M
 
automated hot backups

Thanks for the replies. I have been making copies of the ~/Library/Parallels directory periodically.

I'm hoping to find an automated solution that I can run while the guest OS is running. I can set up a cron job to copy ~/Library/Parallels to my backup server every day, but I would guess that this won't create a usable backup if Parallels and the guest OS are running.

I don't want to have to worry about remembering to manually make the backup every day. My memory isn't that good. :)
 
jasonjasonjason said:
I'm hoping to find an automated solution that I can run while the guest OS is running.
Click to expand...

SuperDuper makes clones of your entire hard drive to an external Firewire drive--which you should have in any event--and will let you schedule automatic backups. The Smart Update feature copies only files that have changed, so after the initial clone, daily backups are relatively fast. (With a MacBookPro Core 2 Duo, I back up about 62 GB in about 11 or 12 minutes.)

David
 
I've recovered from 'hot' back-ups. Probably won't happen every time, but you can get more frequent ones that way. Just make sure you cron in a good one from time to time.
 
Do you have to include the snapshots directory when making backups?

I have been trying to use rsync to copy ~/Library/Parallels to a Linux box, and it doesn't work. One of the large disk files consistently fails verification. Any suggestions?
 
just use the PD own system to clone a VM

the VM I use now is a clone of a clone descended for about 4 or 5 generations

KISS

Keep It Simple S*****

the essence of being a powerr user on the mac is not to do things manually but use the systems already in place

Hugh W
 
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