Time Machine and Individual folder backup from Mounted Guest O/S

KevinClarke

KevinClarke

Product Expert
Dear All,

I use Vista Guest O/S and Parallels 3.0 build 5626

I have my Vista O/S C drive mounted on my MAC via parallels and wanted to use Time Machine to back up selected folders from within this Guest O/S. However, when I go into Time Machine and try to use + and - to select individual folders within the mounted guest O/S all I see are greyed out folders of my guest O/S and therefore I cannot select them for backup.

Outside of Time Machine I am able to manually copy them onto my external drive.

Is Time Machine not designed to work with Parallels in this way?

Any suggestions are welcome as I would prefer to use Time Machine if possible.


many thanks
Kevin
 
Hi John,

Thanks for your quick reply.

Fowing your suggestion. It shows my drive C, and after selecting this all the C drive folders appear greyed out as well so I cannot select anything further. I assume this should work with Time Machine?

In normal operation I am able to copy, edit and delete etc my mounted area fine.

Regards
Kevin
 
Sorry, misleading you
Time Machine cannot backup neither FAT32 nor NTFS partitions
You can backup only whole VM (location folder), but my recommendation to backup it only in stopped state
You can use third party plugins, to set time and frequency for Time Machine
 
Hi John,

No problem.

If I backup periodically /Users/kevin/Documents/Parallels/Microsoft Windows Vista/winvista.hdd this should be the correct object to backup?

Many thanks for your assistance.
Regards
kevin
 
Don't use Time Machine to backup VMs or you'll quickly run out of space, Time Machine will see the the large .hdd as a file that is constantly changing, and it will copy the whole file every time.

A better solution would be to leave out the VMs from Time Machine and copy the whole VM folder to a folder in the Time Machine disk regularly, either manually or creating a script or Automator workflow that runs at a scheduled time that copies and deletes the old backup.
 
Hi,

Thanks for your comments and recommendations. I also just noticed that WD Anywhere Backup (Western Digital External drive backup solution) will not backup the mounted guest folders. I assume this will be a general issue with most back tools due to the different disk formats between MAC and Windows? However, if anyone has seen any tools that do deal with it I'd appreciate it.

Many thanks to all for your comments

Kevin
 
I use Time Machine to backup everything that is Mac, Winclone to regularly clone Boot Camp partitions, and I copy the VMs (the ones that have virtual disks) regularly. To each situation it's own solution, there's no silver bullet (except cloning the whole disk), but each backup/cloning tool have their pros and cons and are more adequate to some situations rather than others, what works best is a combined system. Time Machine should take care of those guest folders that live on the mac side.
 
Recommendation is to use any backup solution, but when Virtual Machine is stopped, and of course in case of Boot Camp, , Specimen mentioned winclone, it is free and working just fine
 
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