Does time Machine back up Windows stuff?

[mgipe]

Sorry for the dumb question, but I'm new to running Windows on Mac. I searched but found nothing useful. If I run Windows virtually with Parallels (or VMWare for that matter) does Time Machine back up all the Windows stuff too? Or do I need to deal with that separately?

What about running Windows with BootCamp?

 

[hfg]

Yes, your virtual machines can be a part of your Time Machine backup ... but you probably don't want to have it that way.

Normally you will add an entry to the Time Machine "Options" to exclude your virtual machine folder. The reason for this is that the VM file is really big (usually 30GB or so on mine) and it changes every time you use it. This causes TM to add a 30GB backup each hour as an incremental backup.

I usually allow TM to include my VMs on the first total backup (so they will be there if I have to do a full restore) and then exclude it from then on. I then handle the backup of the VirtualMachine folder either manually, with a backup utility app, or with a scheduled task script.

I don't store any important data within the VM (I use Quicken for Windows) and direct the datafile to a shared Mac directory (or use DropBox).

Your BootCamp installation will not be part of the Time Machine backup. You will have to do that separately (perhaps use the built in Windows backup). You could probably use a common external backup disk partitioned part as OS X and part as NTFS.


-howard

 

[mgipe]

Thank you so much for this information. I can see how this would be a horrendous waste of time and space since the whole 30GB would be backed up on any change. Your suggestion about using a shared region for data is a good one, too.

Much appreciated!

 

[elistan]

I've wondered about, but haven't investigated yet, creating a sparsebundle file, mounting it, and sticking the VM's files in it. Supposedly sparsebundles can be handled properly by TimeMachine - only the changed parts get backed up because of how it stores data.