can't find vm

hi everyone, I have (or had) a parallels vm on my Mac and I recently did a restore from Sierra back to El Capitain. Everything restored just fine (only went back a week) but i cannot get my VM to fire up. I had the vm for around a year and i used time machine for my backup. I am assuming the file was backed up somewhere but i cannot find it. I also tried to go into TM and look just for the file and do a restore that way. When i get the error message I try to locate it but the folder is empty. Any ideas on how i can get this back? I am assuming TM would back up the file. thanks

PS this is Parallels 12 Pro edition

 

I found the problem. I excluded the .pvm file from TM. dang it

 

As there was no backup of the pvm files, your Windows virtual machines are not recovered. Please create a new virtual machine.

 

so i created another vm slice and everything is business as usual. I want to backup the .pvm file on a monthly basis now, I can automate this but does the vm need to be shut down to back up the file? I leave my vm running 24/7 so i would need to have a tool shut it down and bring it back up if this is the case. What is the norm around here? thanks