Restore From Time Machine??

[W6JHB]

I've run into a serious problem with my Win/Xp guest. It was in the middle of doing some disk tasks and I lost power to the iMac it is running under. When I restarted it, VMWARE pops up with an ugly message about a file missing - trying to continue results in a failure to start the guest. I do have a couple snapshots of the guest, but the most recent is from last December - ughhh! I ran the OS X disk verify utility and it says the disk is OK. Someone is lying!

I have Time Machine running on that iMac. Can I restore the VM environment from one of yesterday's Time Machine backups? If so, is there one specific folder that I can restore the entire thing from?

Jim

[gbullman · Accepted solution]

FYI, I've adopted a VM backup strategy of copying the VM to another disk at the end of each day meaning that at most I'll only lose 1 day's work.

You might get lucky with a Time Machine backup, or it may not work, in your current situation it sounds like it is worth a try.

Do you know where the VM you are trying to resurrect is stored on your iMac? If not your best bet is to bring up Fusion's Virtual Machine Library window, right click on the subject VM and select the Show in Finder command. I would either rename this "broken" VM, or perhaps copy it to another location so you at least have this copy.

While in the directory that contains your "broken" VM (which you need to have renamed or copied before this step); Open up Time Machine (click on the icon in the Dock). Go back in time to when the VM was shut down or suspended (or if that did not occur then some time when you had not been doing much with the VM around the backup time). Chose to restore the VM.

You will find multiple discussions about the short comings of Time Machine backing up Virtual Machines in older posts of this forum. You might get lucky that a particular Time Machine backup is consistent enough for Windows to recover it.

Good Luck. I store my VMs on external drives and have run into cases where a machine crash does a lot of directory damage to the disk hosting the VM. Sometimes Disk Warrior can recover things, sometimes it can't. After one of those occurrences over 2 years ago I started making a backup copy of any VM used that day as part of my end of day routine.

[WoodyZ]

I lost power to the iMac it is running under.

Why aren't you using a UPS (uninterruptible power supply)?

[W6JHB]

"Why aren't you using a UPS (uninterruptible power supply)?"

I am. But, ahhh, ummmmm - the system had been "hung up" for close to half an hour, nothing responsive, and the only options were (1) wait until the cows came home, or (2) power the &^% thing off and restart. I went with number two and am paying the price. The VM guest file is approximately 65 GB and is currently restoring from a Time Machine hard drive. That was the good news. The bad news is that the Time Machine drive is connected to an Airport Extreme and the entire restore process (half done now) is approximately eight hours long. At least I've got other, non Win/XP things to do so the time delay is not a problem. If this works, great. If not, I'm looking at a snapshot restore and a lot of hours to get other files up to date.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Make sure you're restoring from a time when the VM was shut down (not suspended), otherwise you're likely to have a corrupt system.

Time machine is a terrible way to backup VM's - the virutal disk files are completely backed up every time you do anything to one of them, generating huge volumes. You're much better off copying the .vmwarevm file to an external disk.

[W6JHB]

I guess I got lucky. I completed a restore from Time Machine backup (10 hours, across a wireless link!) and the guest VM is working perfectly. The guest had been suspended and VMWARE had been "quit" prior to the time of that backup being taken.

However, you folks are correct - Time Machine is NOT the tool to use for this process, especially for me with a wireless path to the backup disk. I think I'll exclude that folder from Time Machine's backup files and simply copy the .vmwarevm file to a locally attached hard drive periodically.

One question though. How is that process any different from taking periodic VMWARE snapshot's of my guest machine?

[gbullman]

If you're asking about copying to a local disk compared to taking snapshots, the biggest difference is you are copying to another disk, so 2 disks would have to have an issue to loose it all. With snapshots you are storing the changed data within the .vmwarevm bundle (actually a special folder) so if anything happens to that folder you're hosed.

Glad you were able to recover, depending on when Time Machine took backups you might not have been so lucky.

[W6JHB]

Yep, now that I think about it, the snap resides on my boot disk, along with my guest VM file, so if the boot drive craps out, I'm screwed. I think I'll make up a simple script that will copy the file to my locally-attached external drive and use that for backup. I already copy my financial stuff from the Win/XP environment over to the Mac side periodically, and also up to mac.com, but losing the entire VM environment would be ugly to re-establish from scratch.

Thanks for your helpful suggestions!

Jim