I had to replace a hard drive in an iMac last week and had the machine backed up with Time Machine. I installed the new drive, and restored the entire drive with Time Machine. Everything seemed to work fine, except we could not get the Windows virtual machine to run. There did not seem to be any virtual machine present. When I checked the Time Machine backup files, the Windows virtual machine indicated 0kb. Is this a known problem with Parallels virtual machines?
There is an option in the virtual machine configuration to disable Time Machine back up of the virtual machine.
Unfortunately even if the "Disable Backup with Time Machine" button is not checked it seems that Time Machine does not backup the virtual machine for some reason. I even checked the Time Machine configuration and saw nothing there preventing it from backing up the virtual machine. You can however make an archive of the hard disk file (zip for example - keep the original) and Time Machine will back up the archived file. Now that I am using a partition (Winclone will back it up, but was not able to restore it) I let windows backup to a folder on my Time Machine. I have not had need to restore from it yet so I don't know how well it would work.
