Fusion didn't save changes!

[kelvekar]

Hi,

This morning when I started work on Windows XP running under VMWare Fusion on MAC OS C 10.5.4, I discovered that somehow VM had a state of day before yesterday. All my changes from yesterday were lost! I had also installed windows live mail client and it's gone too. I have never taken a snapshot of this VM and Revert option has always been disabled, how can this happen? Have I lost a days work? The VM is running fine, just that it has lost a day's work...

Best Regards,

Gautam

[kelvekar]

My virtual disk got corrupted, after rebooting MAC and restarting VM, windows started off with chkdsk, found lot of problems, and now XP will not boot. I tried to re-install XP on same virtual disk but XP setup fails to detect this virtual disk.

I had not changed "Optimize for VM disk settings"...

[admin]

If you used Easy Install to create the virtual machine, the XP CD needs SCSI drivers to access the virtual disk. You can get them from http://www.vmware.com/download/fusion/drivers_tools.html

[kelvekar]

Thanks for reply, I created another VM and mounted this disk on the new VM (by editing vmx in text editor) and recovered my data by looking thru numerous .chk files created by chkdsk.

Any way I could prevent this from happening again? Is there a way to back up VM while its still running?

[Technogeezer]

Is there a way to back up VM while its still running?

Trying to back up the vmdk files from the MacOS while the VM is running is an almost guaranteed path to a corrupt and unrecoverable backup.

To the Mac, the VM's virtual disk is just a set of files. They're open and being modified by another program (Fusion). Open files in general and open files being written in particular need special care by backup utilities in order to obtain a consistent, recoverable backup. I don't know of any that have any kind of integration with Fusion (unlike VMware's own Consolidated Backup for ESX, which does provide that capability to enterprise server implementations). So your options come down to 1) backing up the VM from within the guest, or 2) suspending or shutting down the VM before backing the vmdk files up on the Mac OS side.

And backing up while snapshots are active and Fusion os running doesn't help ras the virtual disk files are still open to the Mac OS.