Time Machine and Parallels

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ptmccain

Bit poster
Hi, just upgraded to Leopard. Love it; however, when it backs up every hour it is backing up 25 gigs every time. I asked over at the Apple site and a comment I got back was that it could be that it is my entire Parallels system being backed up because even a single change would register across all of it.

So...I would like to exclude Parallels from being backed up by Time Machine, and my entire Virtual Machine.

Where do I go on my Mac HD to exclude my whole Parallels system and all connected PC programs and files associated with it?

Thanks.
 
ptmccain said:
Hi, just upgraded to Leopard. Love it; however, when it backs up every hour it is backing up 25 gigs every time. I asked over at the Apple site and a comment I got back was that it could be that it is my entire Parallels system being backed up because even a single change would register across all of it.

So...I would like to exclude Parallels from being backed up by Time Machine, and my entire Virtual Machine.

Where do I go on my Mac HD to exclude my whole Parallels system and all connected PC programs and files associated with it?

Thanks.
Click to expand...

You can do this in system preferences for the Time Machine. You will see a dialog box where you can press + or - to add or subtract backup volumes.

Personally, my VM is only 8GB, so I am letting Time Machine back it up. I normally backup using SuperDuper, but SuperDuper is not well behaved in Leopard. It will back up only the vanilla operating system, and does not backup any user settings or files (including SuperDuper), so right now, the Time Machine is my primary backup.
 
Eru Ithildur said:
Yeah, 8 GB will get HUGE! 8x24hrx7days = 1.344 Terabytes in a week.
Click to expand...

That is not the way Time Machine works. It saves hourly backups from today. Then 4 backups from yesterday, then 1 per day before that. I have a 1 Terabyte Time Machine Partition, and it does not seem to be rapidly filling up.
 
Thanks for the help. Telling TimeMachine NOT to back up the Virtual Machine did the trick. If I understand correctly it is not the case that VM is not backed up at all, it is just not going to keep getting backed up everytime TimeMachine does a backup. My VM was/is 25 gigs!
 
If you exclude a file from TimeMachine it will not be backed up as far as I have heard.

Purplish, I stand corrected, I missed that when reading through the information on the system. I sadly don't have a machine that can just be 'broken' while I play with Leopard.
 
Eru Ithildur said:
If you exclude a file from TimeMachine it will not be backed up as far as I have heard.

Purplish, I stand corrected, I missed that when reading through the information on the system. I sadly don't have a machine that can just be 'broken' while I play with Leopard.
Click to expand...

I am now sold on Time Machine.

When I started up Parallels today, it prompted my to start from scratch, create a VM and install Windows. I found the pvs file, and clicked on it. The VM was corrupted and caused the whole MAC to crash with the blue curtain of death. Some Parallels driver was corrupted.

I did not start the VM yesterday. In my SuperDuper days, I would have automatically made a bootable clone last night with the corrupted VM. This time, I was able to verify that the corruption extended through yesterday and until early on 11/8. I was able to restore the last good pvm and hdd files from 7:30am 11/8. Unfortunately, I lost several Quicken Transactions by doing this, but I had backed up Quicken to a shared folder on the Mac, so once again, I was able to restore a backed up Quicken data file and restore the missing transactions.
 
I have decided to continue using Time Machine, but I have changed my process.

I disable Time Machine before starting Parallels. I then do my work on Windows. When I exit Windows and Parallels, I turn Time Machine back on. That way I get a backup of the changed VM, but I don't confuse Time Machine by having it start a backup of an 8GB file, and then have to start over when the file changes before it finishes.
 
If Parallels wanted to resolve this and make Time Machine compatible with VM images, one approach could be to "break up" the monolithic image and break it up into a series of smaller files, with each file holding a group of sectors of the virtual drive - that way only the files that represent the modified sectors would get backed up incrementally. How does one get these sorts of feature requests submitted?
 
Purplish said:
I have decided to continue using Time Machine, but I have changed my process.

I disable Time Machine before starting Parallels. I then do my work on Windows. When I exit Windows and Parallels, I turn Time Machine back on. That way I get a backup of the changed VM, but I don't confuse Time Machine by having it start a backup of an 8GB file, and then have to start over when the file changes before it finishes.
Click to expand...

I have changed my process once again, and I wanted to come back here and update. I was getting unstable results by turning Time Machine on and off. I am now excluding Parallels from Time Machine and leaving Time Machine on all the time. When I get to a point where I need a Parallels backup, I copy the VM to a backups folder on one of my external firewire disks. This disk IS backed up by Time Machine so now I have two copies of a good VM.

I have also learned how to delectively selete old files from Time Machine to free up room. I haven't filled up yet, but might in a month or two.
 
Just to clarify:

Does TimeMachine save a new version of each changed file or does it only save the changed made to the file?
 
Leauki said:
That would be a nice skill to have (selectively deleting files). Is there anything special to be paid attention to?
Click to expand...


To do this, Open Time Machine.
Navigate in the file manager to the file or folder you would like to delete. Click once to select it.
Now, in the file manager view, click on the "gear" icon to see a dropdown list of actions.
Click on "Delete All backups of ..."

I haven't played with this very much since I have about 300GB left.
 
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