Virtual Machine is F$%#$%#$^ GONE

[David_Feldbaum]

I am in big trouble but I cant find my dam virtual drive. I recently purchased a new Imac 5K model. I did a time machine restore which is basically a clone of my older Imac. Everything went well. I decided to do some work and opened up parallels. First thing it did was try to re activate which I thought was strange since I was a mirror image of the older imac. Then It said no virtual machine found. WTF. I am now in panic mode. I have time machine backups since May. I looked in all of the folders and search PVM. NOTHING was found and im freaking out. Why would parallels do this kind of thing? What do I do?


I even did a search in my older time machine folders in the User Home/Documents/Parallels and its empty.

 

[HonzaIl]

You may have a problem on your hands...
VMs do not work well with Time Machine backups. Sometime ago Parallels introduced "Smart guard" which may have helped TM-VM relationship, but I never bothered to learn enough about that feature.
Since VMs are giant binary files impossible for TM to understand and smartly split for backups, every change in VM means that TM has to copy the WHOLE VM from scratch (mine has ~24Gb). Which fills TM disk really quickly with many, many VM copies, is awfully slow and in general did not work well for me. For some time there is checkbox in PD Time machine : "DO not backup" . In PD10 it is in Security tab, do not remember where it was in prior versions of PD. It may be on by default, not sure...
comment: Actually, this is something I personally do always manually in TM configuration - I remove folders with VMs from TM backups.
If you had this checkbox checked on prior system, then you do not have VM backup and only thing you can do is get hold of the prior system, copy it from there and transfer it manually.
VMs are best backup by manual/scheduled copying once per week or few weeks. Keep data in Mac, only programs in VM, that way data are in TM on regular schedule and safe. And then you have always reasonably fresh backup of VM programs in case something happens. Rarely one needs "denser" backup of programs then weekly or before updates. And this works well...

 

[Parallels User]

1. TM backups are not clones of your OS X installation, if you want clones use Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper.
2. Parallels asked you for activation because it recognized it's running on different hardware.
3. If in the settings of the VM the "do not backup with time machine" is activated, the VM will not be backed up to TM.
4. Bootcamp based VMs cannot be backed up with TM, or cloned with CCC and SD. They reside in a separate, Windows partitions, they can be backed up with Windows specific utilities, or cloned with Winclone or Acronis True Disk.
5. (to Honzall) It's true that the virtual disk in a VM is a huge binary file, however Parallels has introduced technology to minimize the impact of this on backups, there is an option to "optimize for TM backups" (smart guard is a different thing, it's automated snapshots), which splits the disk into smaller files. However I also prefer to exclude my VMs from TM, and simply copy the pvms.
6. If you still have access to the old disk you can still copy the VM.