Parallels and Leopard Time Machine

D

DerekS

Member
I wonder...

When Leopard comes out, how will Parallels work with the Time Machine? Those large VM files get updated daily...does TM make a full backup of each, or does it do binary deltas?

This will make the difference between needing a 300G backup drive for it, and a 3TB backup drive. :)
 
I hope that Time Machine will be smart enough to let you choose which files and folders that you want to back up constantly. Also I hope it's smart enough to let you back up everything only when/if you need/want it.
 
I didn't investigate this question yet but I am sure it should be the way to exclude some files (such as Parallels HDDs) from being backuped by Time Machine.
 
Well, I kinda very much DO want to back up my parallels vms though...my livelihood is in there. But I was hoping that when I go in and make 512k of changes, that it won't back up the entire 30G VM.

I guess this is really more of a Leopard question than a Parallels one, so I'll table it for now. I was just curious if apps can register a "backup" or delta method with the OS.
 
I've dealt with this part way personally by having Windows' "My Documents" be a directory on my Mac mounted via Parallels Shared Folders. That directory then gets backed up incrementally via my normal nightly backup on the Mac(s). I haven't gone the route of trying out TweakXP or such to change other directories (such as My Favorites) to also use a Mac directory. Admittedly this approach doesn't help for the Registry, applications, etc., although for my uses I'm willing to live with the "gee, lucky me, I get to reinstall apps on disaster" approach (with the occasional .hdd backup as a failsafe).
 
I went to a Leopard developer tech talk in Australia back in Feb and someone asked this question during the time machine presentation. The guy giving the talk was very knowledgeable about time machine / file systems but seemed slightly thrown by this question. He pretty much said that if Parallels stores the Windows image as a single 30gb file then the whole 30gb will be backed up each time because

You can definitely define particular directories that shouldn't be backed up. This solves the problem of needing a massive drive for backups but doesn't really help if you need to be making backups of the files within the windows partition. What Kosh suggests sounds good but I'd like to see Parallels/Apple come up with a better solution.

Keep in mind that this information is 3-4 months old... I don't know how closely Apple and Parallels were working together back then but my guess is they're working more closely these days and it's probably in both of their best interests to make their software compatible
 
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