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Does Time Machine backup windows 7 if it is virtual through parallels?
- Thread starter rcuber
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The parallels VM is just a file like any other file on your mac so it will get backed up.
The downside is that TM will back it up every time, and windows VMs are usually large so you'll be chewing up large portions of your time machine drive just for that one file
The downside is that TM will back it up every time, and windows VMs are usually large so you'll be chewing up large portions of your time machine drive just for that one file
Sorry if this is a dumb question but i just ordered my first mac. Every time it backs up it will back up another 20 gigs? or just write over what it had before? So if my hard drive is replaced i just have to go to my time machine back up and it will restore all my files including the virual machine just as it was from the last back up?
So if i had a 4 gig movie it would write that every time it backed up? I'm not usre how that would work. can you set it to just over write if the files are the exact same thing?
Yes. However, to be clear, this is the exception rather than the rule. As a rule, TimeMachine backs up the changes in files, not the entire file. But for a VM, it looks like, from other responses here, that TM backs up the entire VM every time. Probably TM sees the VM as an entirely different file each time. A movie, however, will get backed up once and as long as you don't edit it in some way, won't be backed up again.
Yes.
The issue is that, to OS X/Time Machine, your VM's entire hard drive looks like one giant file (or sometimes several slightly less giant files). This means that whenever you do anything at all inside of the VM, Time Machine will see it as that one giant file being edited and will have to create another copy of it in the backup.
Will it ever delete the old backups? That is a problem for me because I am a gamer and i cannot have it back up 75 gigs of files every hour. Could I use carbon copy cloner to backup everything including the virtual machine? Would ccc read it as a different file every time as well. Im pretty sure it would kind of work in the same way but since lion is new would carbon copy cloner work the same way it did before?
Yes TM starts deleting old backs as the drive fills up.
I personally exclude my VM from Time Machine as I do not want hourly backups of the VM - that will fill up my TM volume in no time and defeat the incremental backups that TM provides. I manually back up my VM to an external drive as needed.
I personally exclude my VM from Time Machine as I do not want hourly backups of the VM - that will fill up my TM volume in no time and defeat the incremental backups that TM provides. I manually back up my VM to an external drive as needed.
How do you do that? So if your drive failed would you have to reinstall fusion or parallels or would that that still be in the backup? If you had the vm backed up separately how would you get it back in parallels when you got a new drive? Also in my case should I use carbon copy cloner? Will that work with lion?