Hey guys, I've searched on this topic, but I'm very new to OSX and Parallels, so I would greatly appreciate your help! I have OSX 10.6 on a 2011 MacBook Pro. I installed W7 on a BootCamp partition. I installed Parallels Desktop 5 for Mac, and "pointed it" to the BootCamp installation. Now, my questions! 1. I have moved all of my user-generated data files (outlook, notes, etc) to the Parallels share folder, which is in my Mac Documents folder, and access them while they live there. If I select "Do not back up with Time Machine" in my Parallels Config, will it not backup folders in my Parallels Share, or JUST NOT BACKUP THE .PVM files? 2. I'm still not clear how to backup W7, in a way that can be restored. I tried using W7 Backup and Restore, but while this appears to work when booting into BootCamp, Parallels does not like it at all. So apparently, I need to back up and restore in tandem with Parallels, right? The only solution I've been able to discern is to CLONE the virtual machine. My question is: if I made the VM by pointing parallels to my bootcamp partition, what's the deal with my VM? I tried cloning my VM, which is originally a 22MB file on my Mac OS. And the clone is a similarly small file. Obvious, there's not a W7 OS in that file. So what's the deal - do I need to create another W7 installation directly in a virtual machine? People mention WinClone and then say 'yeah it kinda works, but it's wierd.' I'm not going to mess with a "sometimes" solution when it comes to data. 3. My backup hardware is an external HDD dock. I'd like to keep all the data on a single HDD unit (to be duplicated). W7 backup and TimeMachine don't seem to like each other, so I'd have to use discrete HDD's to fully backup my data, unless you guys can tell me that this "cloning" method will help me cover every single bit of data... Thanks for any help you guys can provide. Part of this process is conceptualizing where my data lives and how/where it's backed up, but I really can't find much definitive info out there. Thank you for reading. Fitz
