The Mac Mini is a late 2009 with a RAID 1 mirror running 10.10.3. Parallels Desktop 10.2.1 is hosting Win 7 Pro. Work and need for backup will occur on both to a similar level with perhaps more done on the Windows side. My local backup strategy is to create two partitions on an External 5 TB drive. One partiton will be Mac OS Extended Journaled and use 2 TB. Time Machine will do the backups excluding the vpm to keep it from filling up too fast. The other partition will be NTFS 3 TB. I plan to do manual backups of the vpm occasionally or automatically on a monthly basis. My main software package on Windows has a built in backup schedule tool that I plan to use to do daily backups of it's data. And finally, I plan to run backup software that came with the drive to select the remaining files that need backup. So far I have used Disk Utility to Partition the drive and format the Mac partition and to format the other to exfat. I then ejected the partitions, shut down Windows, rebooted, started Parallels, attached the drive and found Disk Manager. Repeated attempts to format the Windows partition failed. All steps repeated trying FAT32. It now seems to be working, having unchecked the quick format option. It seems like this would have been a very simple task but it is taking days. Any suggestions for a better strategy, or different hardware, or other tools for formating the drive?
Hi Pam, The best way to secure a pvm files is to take a back up in an external hard drive with format of ExFAT. Note: OS X does not support writing to NTFS partitions by default. We recommend to format your external drive to either an OS X native HFS+ file system or ExFAT file system (for compatibility with Windows PCs). Note: FAT32 file system does not support files bigger than 4 GB.
