Another Boot Camp and Time Machine question

[VMWDave]

Forgive me for asking this question again if it has been answered before.  I've done signifcant research, but I still can't find the answer to the question that suits my situation.

I'm running my Boot Camp (Windows 7 64-bit) partition as a VM in the latest version of Fusion.  When I do so, Time Machine wants to back up 3.4 GB of data nearly every time it runs while I'm running the Boot Camp VM.  This is currently the only VM I have configured; there are no others.

I've read where I can exclude my Virtual Machine folder in Time Machine, but I've found a couple of things:

     1.  I don't have a Virtual Machine folder in the standard place the threads have mentioned.

     2.  I've found my Boot Camp VM setup, but it's only in the neighborhood of 150MB.

Why is it backing up so much data?  I'm at a loss on how to stop it.  Excluding my VM folder (which appears to be empty since I don't have any other VMs installed) hasn't helped.  3.4GB of data every hour eats up resources and slows the drive access while it's running, not to mention clogging up my Time Capsule with backup data I don't need or want to be backed up.

A point to a thread where this has been answered would be great, but after looking I just can't find it.  I reach out to you, VM Community, for assistance.

Thank you.

[WoodyZ]

Exclude: "/Users/${USER}/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/Virtual  Machines/"

[VMWDave]

Thank you.  Unfortunately, I've tried that.  I did see that in one of the answer threads to a previous question.  That totals 216MB.  Time Machine is backing up 3.4GB each time while I'm running the Boot Camp VM.

Ideas?

[WoodyZ]

At the present time I'm not using Boot Camp so I cannot investigate this particular scenario however the methodology I'd use would be the same regardless and that is I'd filter the output of fs_usage piped through grep redirected to a text file to then examine what's being read and written by Time Machine and then make the appropriate exclusions.

[WoodyZ]

Okay, while I'm not using Boot Camp nonetheless I gave it some thought about what specifically from the output of fs_usage I'd be wanting to look at in an attempt to see what Time Machine is backing up while using VMware Fusion so these are my thoughts on the issue.

There are many different processes that are in play so I though what's the appropriate filter that would incorporate an absolute that would be in common with all of the Time Machine related processes and the primary constant is part of the pathname /Volumes/VOLUME_NAME/Backups.backupdb and from that I'd use backupd as not only is that part of the destination pathname of the files being written by Time Machine it's also the name of the Backup Daemon.  So with that in mind I would use the following command in a Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/) to capture the filesystem activity related to Time Machine and from the filtered output hopefully you'll be able to see what will need to be excluded.  I'll also be glad to look at the output in an attempt to isolate what needs to be excluded.

So here is how I'd go about this...

Let the system be idle for a bit so Time Machine isn't backing up but will start shortly after running VMware Fusion again.  you should be able to tell when Time Machine is going to backup again and time everything accordingly.  With VMware Fusion having run again there should be something to backup and before Time Machine starts backing up you need to execute the following command in a Terminal and then after Time Machine does its thing you set focus back to the Terminal and press Ctrl+C to terminate the command.  After terminating the command you can then look at the fs_usage_backupd.txt file on your Desktop.

Copy and paste, as is, then following command in a Terminal and then press Enter and type in your password and press Enter.  Note that you will not see your password being typed and the command prompt will not return until you press Crtl+C when it's time to stop collecting the data that will be analyzed.

sudo fs_usage -f filesys | grep backupd > ~/Desktop/fs_usage_backupd.txt