What is actually the deal with using Time Machine

I heard different things from different people - including conflicting opinions in the docs and Parallel's support - about using Time Machine with Windows XP virtual machines.

If it is true that the entire HD gets backed up again every time any change is made then of course I would want to exclude it. Is that still true with version 4 though? Support seems to tell me it's fine to use Time Machine and it it doesn't do wasteful backups, but the docs and other people seem to say something different - that since the HD file is one humongous file that any change causes a new multi-gigabyte Time Machine backup. Which is correct?

And another question - is there any difference between excluding the VM backup in its own configuration settings as opposed to excluding the folder in the Time Machine preferences directly?

Thanks,

doug

 

It will backup the whole .hdd each time. Please consider using snapshots instead, see the manual

No difference