How thorough is a Time machine backup?

[Imola Ghost]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

I would le to know if a time machine backup would/will backup my VMWare Windows side also?

I've got Quickbooks running in the Windows 7 side and wanted to know if it backs up that also.

 

[maflynn]

If you don't exclude your vmware directory it will back up your entire windows vm image, which you may not want because TM will back that up every time you boot windows.

I manually copy my vmware image because I don't want 30gig of data being backed up constantly.

 

[willieva]

Using tm to backup a virtual machine is a bad idea. The vm files are constantly updated, so they will be backed up everytime tm runs. This will be many gig of files being backed up, which could be detrimental to your network.

Also I wouldn't trust a tm backup of a vm. The files backed up at the beginning of the backup process might not match the ones from the end. Doing a restore of a vm backed up by tm might not work everytime.

 

[william1949]

Can only go by what happened to me. Two weeks ago I had a total hard drive failure. New Hard drive - I got everything back from my Time Machine back up including VM. Everything seems fine, however I do not anything really critical on the windows side (some taxes, and they seem fine). I also do find the backup process overly long (I also only back up twice a day instead of hourly - Time Machine Editor).

 

[maflynn]

I also do find the backup process overly long (I also only back up twice a day instead of hourly - Time Machine Editor).

If you manually back up your VM to an external drive and then exclude it from TM, your back ups will go a lot quicker. In my case as I stated, my VM is 30gb and that would get backed up all the time if I don't exclude it.

The other downside is that such a large file means that I'll have less history available because TM will have to delete old backups to make room for new ones.

 

[william1949]

Whoops: I was trying to say "I do not find the backup process overly long" - my original post was awkwardly worded and not what I was trying to say.