Hi Everyone, Hope you all doing well. I recently bought a Time Capsule to back up my Mac. I have parallels 7 installed and running Windows 7 on it. I have connected an external drive to my parallels and saved all my documents on to it. I heard if I configure Time machine to backup it will take a backup of my parallels as well. My question here is will Time Machine backup my external drive which is connected to the windows on parallels..?? Please advise. Regards Manoj
No, it will not. You should consider a native Windows backup solution. There isn't one unique solution out there that will backup Windows and OS X in a incremental and satisfactory way. Time Machine is tailored towards OS X.
Depending on the rate of change of the Windows Virtual Machine, you may find that routing OS X boot volume backups as done by SuperDuper! will be satisfactory to save the virtual machine files. Even a finder copy of just the the .pvm file (really a package) can provide a complete backup of the virtual machine at that instant of time. You should not have Parallels Desktop for Mac running when you do the backup. Use of Time Machine to back up the active virtual machines often generates more backup files than desirable, depending on the .pvm package structure. This is why the .pvm files are normally excluded by Time Machine. However, letting Time Machine backup the copied .pvm package is somewhat reasonable, since that copy should never change and will only be backed up once. An additional advantage of the .pvm clone or Finder copy is the ability to instantly restore that copy should the working virtual machine be damaged beyond repair as might happen with an update or malware infection. Simply copy the saved .pvm file to replace the damaged instance, double-click it, and carry on.
