Time Machine & Win XP Virtual Machine Backups

Discussion in 'macOS Virtual Machine' started by judger48193, Dec 11, 2011.

  1. judger48193

    judger48193 Member

    Messages:
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    I have an iMac 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo running OS X 10.6.8 with 3 GB Ram. I have Time Machine (TM) backing up to a brand new Seagate GoFlex Desk for Mac with 2 TB using a FireWire 800 connection (the old Western Digital external drive started having problems starting and killed the Mac boot). I have excluded a TM backup of my Win XP VM due to performance. I also have shared files between the Mac and the VM. After I did a complete first TM backup of the Mac, I read the Parallels Desktop 5 for Mac manual and did a copy/paste of the XP VM to the Seagate since the TM backups use very little space. I am running build 5.0.9376. Surprisingly, the copy/paste of the 39 GB VM pvm took only 11 minutes, much faster than the initial TM backup.

    I know nothing about TM, have never needed to restore any files from TM and spend almost all of my time in the XP VM. When I bring up TM I have no idea if I am getting the backups that I thought I would.

    - It keeps mentioning the VM pvm and when it was updated. I excluded it from the TM backups. Why is it tracking it?
    - In TM, I have to go back to the time of the first backup to find a the fairly static shared file. It seems to show it in recent backups but a right click will not give the restore option. If I go all the way back to the initial TM backup, I can then right click and get the restore option. Does this sound right?
    - Is my assumption correct that by manually backing up the XP VM pvm, I can restore this VM to the manual backup point-in-time should I ever lose the Mac, get it fixed or eplace it and after I re-install Parallels?
     

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