Time Machine restore

Hi. I am recovering from disk problems and looking for help in getting my XP virtual machine back from my Time Machine.

The Time Machine backup was created under Snow Leopard/Parallels 6. I upgraded to Lion (part of the reason why I had the disk problems).

What steps do I follow to restore my Parallels 6 installation/configuration from Time Machine?

Thank you.

-David

 

Hi David,

Do you mean your Virtual Machine .pvm file (the actual Virtual Machine) or the Parallels configuration files?

If the former, you may have a problem if you told the program "not to backup" your virtual machines with Time Machine. (This is one of the configurable options). I personally put my VM's (.pvm files) on a separate "data" drive and keep track of backing them up myself. Snapshots are great from within the VM but I like to keep a "copy" of them on another drive so I don't use Time Machine to back them up. If you haven't changed any defaults the location of your VM's would be Macintosh HD/users/yourusername/documents/Parallels. Substitute "yourusername" with your actual user name.

If the later, I'm thinking that you'd be better off simply reinstalling Parallels and then "opening" the .pvm file (hopefully still available). This will ask you if you "moved" or "copied" the file which in your case the answer would be moved. The only difference that I can tell in these two options is that if you answer copy it assigns a new Mac address (network stuff) to the VM.

I hope this helps...

Craig