Best Way to Backup VMs? rsync?

Hello,
Sorry if this has been asked a bunch, but my searches brought up a bunch of unrelated posts. So I'm just wondering the best way to backup my parallels VMs. I currently do not use time machine for this and instead use a nightly rsync command line script to just mirror my VM directory to an external hard drive. The copy seems to be working but I'm worried because I have never really tested to see if I can actually restore the VMs from these copies if my main HD crashed. Just wondering if anybody has restored a VM from a backup using rsync before? Or is there a better, officially supported way to do this that doesn't include time machine?

My rsync command looks like this: rsync -av --delete /Volumes/OS/VMs/ /Volumes/Backups/VMs

Any advice on this would be helpful...thanks in advance!

 

Hi Ransom22

Parallels Desktop virtual machines are very similar to real computers, therefore they are subjected to the same threats as real computers: hard disk corruptions, data lossed, power outages. We recommend creating Virtual Machine backups on regular basis to keep your work and data safe.

Please refer below link to Back Up a Virtual Machine.

http://download.parallels.com/desktop/v9/ga/docs/en_US/Parallels Desktop User's Guide/33322.htm