How do I restore a virtualized OS X Lion 10.7 client with Time Machine?

[ShinySteelRobot]

Hi all,

I've got a Time Capsule set up so that my virtual Lion clients back themselves up. This works great; my Lion clients see it as a remote Time Machine and happily back up regularly. So far so good.

However, if I have a problem with a virtual Lion client and need to restore it from the remote Time Machine backup, I always get an error that says something like this:

"You can't restore this backup because it was created by a different model of mac"

What? It's the very same virtual client that I created the backup with!?!?!  How do I fix this problem?

(On a tangential note, in a virtual Lion client when I try to enter Time Machine to recover a lost file or two, the client appears to freeze up.)

Thanks for any help!

[timothysutton]

Darius, is there any way (even unsupported) to override this board-id string via a setting in the .vmx file? It looks to me like the "440BX Desktop Reference Platform" string is part of the 440BX ROM within the vmx binary.

[dariusd]

Hi Timothy, and welcome to the VMware Communities!

The "440BX Desktop Reference Platform" string appears in several locations, within the 440BX BIOS ROM and also in our platform EFI ROMs.  Unfortunately, for Mac OS guests, the relevant ones are the ones that are buried inside the compressed EFI ROMs, which would require quite some amount of tinkering to be able to successfully find and modify.

We don't have any switch that can be used to override the board-id, unfortunately.  We do have an open bug to fix this situation, but until then you're out of luck (unless you can convince Apple to handle unrecognized-yet-unchanged board-id strings in Time Machine restores).

--

Darius

[ColoradoMarmot]

What should work is to do a clean OSX install, then point the migration wizard at the time machine backup.

[dpilone]

Hi - just wanted to ping this thread again and see if there was any update on this.  This whole thing took me by surprise when we tried to restore a TM backup (from a VM running in VMware Fusion) back into a new VM.  We migrated our VMs from Parallels and have been very happy with the stability of Fusion, but this throws a big wrench in things.  Right now we're recovering back into a Parallels VM then reimporting, but that's a mess.  Thanks -- Dan

[dariusd]

Hi Dan, and welcome to the VMware Communities!

The good news is that we are working on this and have made good progress.  It's not quite polished, but the infrastructure is now in place.  If you are feeling adventurous want to try it out, grab the VMware Fusion Tech Preview 2013, and add the following config option to the VM's .vmx file:

   SMBIOS.reflectHost = "TRUE"

With that option, the virtual machine will use the same hardware model information as the host (i.e. System Profiler inside the guest will report the same model information as the host).  Since the model information is embedded into the Time Machine backups and is checked at restore time, this won't necessarily help with full system restores from existing backup sets, but it should allow newly-created backup sets to be restored successfully.

Note that the Tech Preview is pre-release software, so it's not for everyone... Make sure you have adequate backups of your virtual machines (i.e. a full copy of the VMs taken while they are powered off) if you choose to play with the Tech Preview.

Cheers,

--

Darius

[IanAtGood]

Darius -

Thanks for writing this up: I've been experiencing the "created by a different model of Mac" error (with Time Machine on Mountain Lion running on VMware Fusion 5.0.3), and it's been a major roadblock in getting a VM-based build system up and going where I am. In summary:

• Using Migration Assistant (Apple's suggestion of what to do in these circumstances) is a non-starter: I've got lots of stuff in /usr and /opt which Migration Assistant will not restore automatically, and putting them back by hand is missing the point.
• Backing up the contents of the .vmwarevm directory on the host OS isn't going to fly either, as other posters have noted: even tiny changes chew up gigabytes on the backup volume, and you have to shut down the guest to do the backup.

So, I've downloaded the 'Tech Preview' version, and with SMBIOS.reflectHost set (by manually editing the .vmx file) it does fix the bug - hooray! I can generate TM backups from one VM, and successfully create a new VM with the same contents by booting from the install CD and choosing the 'restore from Time Machine' option. Is there a timescale for having this fix available in a production version of Fusion?

The one remaining issue is that my TM backups are now effectively locked to the same Mac Mini hardware which is generating them; this rather spoils the point of having VMs in the first place. Wouldn't it be nice if Fusion could report a board ID and SPHardwareDataType which are (a) the same whatever machine is hosting the VM and (b) acceptable to Time Machine. Any chance of addressing this issue?

Thanks,

Ian

[ColoradoMarmot]

That's a time machine specific limitation if I remember right.

What stuff are you putting in /usr and /opt?  I've never found anything that's not migrated over by the wizard (unless I put something there manually, which isn't supported by Apple).

In theory, you should be able to use something like Carbon Copy Cloner to clone from one mounted virtual disk to another.