As a rule, I don't back up VMs because simply booting them causes them to be backed up. This is helped because Parallels Tools provides guest filesystem access. So I periodically back up VMs manually. But what if Parallels could have a preference to "Only Back Up Snapshots"? This would solve the issue quite nicely. If I want a backup of a VM, I don't have to do anything special in Time Machine or manually back it up, I just make a snapshot in Parallels. When I boot that VM, I don't cause a huge backup of the VM, or anything at all to be backed up for that matter. All the other Time Machine semantics are maintained as well, including deletion of snapshots to be simply be removed from backups with the normal expectations. A finer-grained approach to this would be to have the Snapshot Manager allow individual snapshots to be marked for Time Machine backup. I think I would actually prefer this over backing up all snapshots, but it might be more work. Thoughts?
Hi Brian, Please let us know the version of Parallels Desktop and Windows Virtual Machine, so that we can assist you better on this issue.
