Backing-up Apple Hard Drive Using TimeMachine and VMware 12.1.2

[yjao]

Apple Support advised me to contact VMware to find out whether vmware fusion 12.1.2 and everything in its environment (windows and windows apps such as quicken for windows) would be be backed up when backing up my MacBook Air Hard drive using Time Machine.

[Technogeezer]

Time Machine and virtual machines do not play well together and the combination should be avoided. 

You can not guarantee that all components of a VM will be backed up by Time Machine as a consistent unit (especially if the VM is powered on during a backup), meaning that backups of a running VM can be corrupt. You won’t know it’s corrupt until you try and restore it.  And since Time Machine backs up complete files, an entire VM will be treated as changed when backed up, wasting backup disk space. 

For these reasons, VMware recommends excluding VMs from Time Machine backups.

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[HurcoMv]

From my experience, you should not rely on Time Machine to backup your virtual machines. What I do, and I recently had to recover from a complete MacBook failure (chips fried on the main board) is...

Create a separate afps volume to store your VM on and exclude that volume from Time Machine backups. This is on the MacBook Air. Depending on your disk capacity etc, you might have to do this in 2 steps as you'll need enough space to copy (move) your VM.

As often as you're happy with, that is, based on your VM usage and importance etc, suspend the VM and copy the folder where your VM is stored manually to an external USB/SSD etc. I use the same physical device for both Time Machine and the VM backups - you just need to create a volume to use for the VM backup and let Time Machine create it's own sparse bundle for your Time Machine backups. You could use a NAS device if you want - we use that during the day at work.

Obviously you can tune this to suit your requirements - I only do 1 VM backup per week, but I backup specific projects or application files each day to a NAS device.

[Technogeezer]

That’s good advice @HurcoMv  . I’d add to shut down Fusion before making copies. 

Another alternative that works for me is Vimalin (www.vimalin.com). When run in a free mode, it will back up your VMs manually. It has a paid option to schedule and run backups automatically. 

[ColoradoMarmot]

100% - Time machine is completely unreliable for backing up things like virtual machines or sparse bundles (especially if they are in use during the backup).  

Honestly, I wouldn't trust time machine for a complete system restore in any case.  Apple also excludes other things that you may want.  Best option is to shut everything down, then use something like Carbon Copy Cloner to make a full clone of the data volume of your machine.