Time Machine not backing up my vmWare image file

[pdmcmahon]

So, I have a vmWare Fusion install and the image file is saved in "~/vmWare/Windows XP Professional SP3.vmwarevm". For some reason, Time Machine does not back up this file. Could it be due to the single 6GB size of the file? My Time Machine drive is formatted HFS like it should be for TM.

Thoughts?

[CPressland]

It's a bugfix in a previous version of VMWare Fusion. Basically, because time machine backs up only files that have changed, if you boot up and do something on your virtual machine it's got to re-backup the entire Virtual Machine hard drive.

So if you say you're working on a virtual machine for six hours and time machine is setup to backup every hour, now lets say that the Virtual Disk is about 10GB, that means over six hours you've backed up 60GB of data.

Thats why it wont backup VMWare discs. Use VMWares built in Snapshots instead.

[pdmcmahon]

It's a bugfix in a previous version of VMWare Fusion. Basically, because time machine backs up only files that have changed, if you boot up and do something on your virtual machine it's got to re-backup the entire Virtual Machine hard drive.

So if you say you're working on a virtual machine for six hours and time machine is setup to backup every hour, now lets say that the Virtual Disk is about 10GB, that means over six hours you've backed up 60GB of data.

Thats why it wont backup VMWare discs. Use VMWares built in Snapshots instead.

bollocks, I theorized about that but I was hoping it wasn't the reason

[CPressland]

Yeah, I cant find the Changelog where they added it... but trust me, thats what they done, minus the bad paragraph structure of course :D.

[dyn]

Just make sure your Fusion is up to date; the fix for the problem Vegetunks describes has been resolved in version 1.1.2. The newest version at this time is 1.1.3. You could also run Fusion 2.0 rc1 but that's a work in progress so you might experience some stability issues (though Fusion beta's and rc's are very stable).

Release notes for 1.1, 1.1.1, 1.1.2 and 1.1.3 can be found here.

Also make sure the directory your vm's are in is not on the Time Machine exclusion list.

[se7en.hu]

last I read the .vmware files had some extensions to prevent it from being backed up via Time Machine

[pdmcmahon]

So, I updated to 1.1.3 and now it's backing up my image file. However, after reading Vegetunks' initial reply, I don't know if I want it to take a snapshot after every boot of the VM, as it will now create a big fat 8GB footprint over and over. For now, it's good to know that I can back it up if needed, for now I will put that directory in my exclude list.

Thanks for the help everyone, this is just another gentle reminder of why I love this forum.