now doing work: three important questions

[chip]

I'm using Linux in parallels and it's so deceptively reliable that I'm starting to do real work with it....which brings me to the following serious questions:

1. backup. I'm starting to accumulate work in directories that I do not want to lose. What is the (non-$600..True Image seems to cost $600 per seat) way to keep myself backed up, preferably on my host mac OS? If not that, an external firewire drive? Any reason I cannot use rsync of all directories to the host mac OS on a cron schedule?

2. upgrades. If I upgrade parallels, do I have to worry about the /usr/; /etc/; and of course ~ directory contents? How best to make sure that they are still there after an upgrade?

3. shared directories. I understand that, unlike the windows guest OS, there is no opportunity to share directories with the OS10.4 system. That's a pity, as some of what I calculate I can further analyze most efficiently within the Mac system. Any best-practices being developed by anyone?

thanks,
Chip

 

[ivel]

I'm using Linux in parallels and it's so deceptively reliable that I'm starting to do real work with it....which brings me to the following serious questions:

1. backup. I'm starting to accumulate work in directories that I do not want to lose. What is the (non-$600..True Image seems to cost $600 per seat) way to keep myself backed up, preferably on my host mac OS? If not that, an external firewire drive? Any reason I cannot use rsync of all directories to the host mac OS on a cron schedule?

I think you're looking at the expensive server version...
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/


Hope this helps,
-Levi

 

[beattyMBP]

I'm starting to accumulate work in directories that I do not want to lose. What is the (non-$600..True Image seems to cost $600 per seat) way to keep myself backed up, preferably on my host mac OS? If not that, an external firewire drive? Any reason I cannot use rsync of all directories to the host mac OS on a cron schedule?

OK, correct me if I'm wrong, but the one of the beauties of a VM is the ability to back it up by just copying the image files of the hard drives! So just copy (using the MacOSX finder) the hard drive images and shared folders to other drives........no new software required.

I do use SuperDuper on the Mac side (since it is not a VM) to back up my mac, but the VM images for parallels shoudl just go along for the ride......along with other unix directores too.

 

[RickMaddy]

I'll answer 3 first:

I haven't actually done this since I'm not running Linux under Parallels but...

If you turn on Windows Sharing under OS X you should then be able to go in Linux and mount the share. I believe it will be a smb filesystem but I'm not positive. I know I can mount an OS X path under my Windows 2000 guest OS so I'm assuming Linux will work too.

Question 1 - If you solved Q3 then Q1 becomes easy. Just run a cron job or some script that tars up your files and then copies them the OS X share. Now you can back that up along with the rest of the OS X backups you already do (you do backup your Mac - right?)

Question 2 - A Parallels upgrade doesn't touch existing hdd files representing a particular VM. Remember, a Parallels upgrade is upgrading the Paralells software. Your actual VM is just a single file on the host system.

HTH,
Rick

 

[jackr]

> OK, correct me if I'm wrong, but the one of the beauties of a VM is the ability
> to back it up by just copying the image files of the hard drives!
> So just copy (using the MacOSX finder) the hard drive images and shared
> folders to other drives........no new software required.

You know, this doesn't actually seem to work. I've been making such copies (just the .hdd file, copied with dd when Parallels is not running), and I just needed it (Parallels hung somehow, hadda kill it, and then it says there's no boot image). But when I copied the back-up over top the active .hdd, it still sees no boot image. So I'm thinking I must need to copy the .pvs, too?