I read your longish message on my iPhone so pardon if I missed something. One thing you should be aware of is Fusion deliberately excludes large VM files to prevent conflicts with Time Machine, if you remove the exclusion attributes, Fusion may re-apply them, defeating your task or at least making it even more difficult.

Backing your data with Time Machine, IMO requires two overlapping strategies, not unlike what you're proposing. One is let Time Machine do its thing minus the large files that are excluded and at your desired interval, e.g. weekly, perform a complete backup of the Documents > Virtual Machines folder. Incremental backups like Retrospect are somewhat defeated because they backup all the gigabytes of a VM file. AFAIK, there are no so-called "data de-duplication" utilities capable of doing sub-file binary differential backups across multiple large files. This means the best thing to do is full backups for your large files as often as you can afford the time.

I did verify that upon VM opening, VMware Fusion re-adds the TIme Machine exclusion attributes to VMDK(s), vmem backing store, and other snapshot files. This means if you want to back these up via Time Machine ever, you will need to strip the exclusion attribute with the VM off or suspended. To remove the attribute I used xattr -d com.apple.metadata:com_apple_backup_excludeItem *

If you want to keep Time Machine totally separate from your virtual machines as described above, you can exclude the whole Virtual Machines folder in System Preferences > Time Machine and use an alternate backup method for that folder.

dogmaster wrote:
By byte count, what you said is absolutely true, except the disturbing part about how Fusion allows Time Machine to work is that Time Machine saves the Fusion app, VM Library State and even the VM configuration files deceivingly implying things are "OK". Then on a restore, when you go to start a VM, oops! no virtual disk (VMDK) or snapshots! IMO, this bad, very bad. VMware should exclude all or none of the VM!


The script it easy enough, it's a one line find statement relative to ~/Documents/Virtual Machines. I don't think turning off Time Machine is necessary unless it's already in the middle of a backup and you want it to start over.


Correct.


To my knowledge the definite list is not known except what you can find empirically by using all of Fusion's options that generate files and running xattr against them. So far, the files excluded are files with the potential to get "large."

I back up my imac with Time Machine and my XP and Ultimate VM's on another external HD through Norton 360 the latter backs up automatically as with Time Machine and only backs up changes made since the previous back up. Keeps it simple no messing around.

bump ? :P

In Leopard 10.5.5, there are no exclusions listed in the Time Machine prefs to stop TM from backing up the virtual machines. I've added the main vm folder (/Users/<username>/Documents/Virtual Machines/) to exclusions, but where do snapshots get saved? I can't see them and I'd prefer to stop TM from backing them up.

DN

For folks who aren't wedded to Time Machine itself, I've found CrashPlan ($25/seat) to do a pretty good job of cross-platform, Time-Machine-like, peer-to-peer backup between Mac, Windows, and Linux servers - with the added advantage of off-site backups (for a fee, from them, or for free, from your friends - who don't have to buy CrashPlan either).

Like Time Machine, it appears to use the FSEvents system to back up only the changed files. (On Linux, it uses inotify, but that has some bugs; on Windows, I think it may use Shadow Volume Copy or something like that.) I have the VMWare volumes excluded on the Mac, and then I have them back themselves up directly from the guest OS to my server. This has the advantage of file-level granularity on your Windows files, just like your Mac files. It stores only the portions of the files that have changed, in an xdelta-like format, so it's highly compressed and deduplicated (kinda like git). I sprang for the Pro version, which at $60 can keep any number of previous versions for any number of days, so you've really got point-in-time restore as far back as you want it. Best: It regularly checks the integrity of the backups. Anyone who's tried to do tape backups has discovered the joy of a corrupted backup file.

Downsides: It's a CPU hog, even on the 64-bit Java 6 VM. You can set it to limit its own CPU when you're at the keyboard, but obviously, that slows down your backups, and it doesn't seem entirely accurate; on an 8-core Mac Pro, I've seen it use up 100% of a core even when it was theoretically limited to less than that. There's an upgrade coming in the next few weeks that's supposed to offer 400% faster backups with 30% CPU, so that may get better.

Also, the UI for restoring is a bit clunky, and forces you to go date-first, rather than tree-first; if you know you need an older version of a file, but don't know what the last "known good" version was, you're in for a lot of mousing. It has had a number of bugs (fewer lately) that cause it to lose track of which files have actually changed. This doesn't cause any problems, since your backup peer will store only the changed bytes (=0 bytes), but it does make the CPU problems worse, and waste a lot of disk and network bandwidth.

There are free automatic updates every few months, but they're forced and unannounced, which gives me the willies a bit. (I don't know if the enterprise version has more control over that. BTW, the enterprise version is named "Pro Server", not to be confused with the home "Pro" version I bought, which of course has a server component as well..) Also, although your backups are encrypted, the logs (which are apparently either sent to, or retrievable by, their support team) have your filename and pathnames in them, which is a pretty big privacy leak that I've alerted them to.

That said, having once done a complete tour of EVERY Windows backup solution, from free to $10K, and finding them all pathetically lacking and buggy, and nonetheless having bought my own DDS-4 drive and, later, VXA-2 10-tape carousel, and nonetheless still having had to send drives off to OnTrack three or four times... CrashPlan is the best damn backup I've seen, and the only one that's been hands-free enough to use and rely on, and for under $100 it's crazy.