Time Machine and Windows Partition

Time Machine and VMware Fusion

I use Office 2003 and Windoze XP in VMware Fusion. I point "My Documents" to a shared folder outside of my Windoze installation ("Mac side"), thus all documents created by Office 2003 defaults to that location. This allows me to save and access my files individually in Time Machine. And since I also have Office for Mac installed, I can open and edit those files under OSX (without opening Windoze).

If you save your office files inside of your Windoze virtual machine, Time Machine will back them up as part of your virtual machine (as a "vmwarevm" file), not as individual files. Thus in this case, to restore any file created in Office, you would have to restore your whole virtual machine, UNLESS of course you are manually backing up your documents to a folder outside of Windoze (which I have to do with applications like Expensable 8).

So you would need to target your "My Documents" to a shared folder or manually backup your documents to a shared folder to allow Time Machine to see your Office files individually.