Hi everyone,
I upgraded to Leopard just before Christmas. I decided to give TimeMachine a run since it's one of the new great features of Leopard. I have a 500 Gb firewire external drive plugged into a Macbook Pro 2.33 GHz with 2 Gb of RAM.
Everything is working ok but I've aready run out of disk space on my 500 gb drive!. The problem is with the virtual disk that Fusion sets up. Since it's 20 Gb in size and since I run Windows all the time, TimeMachine always backs it up. I knew this was going to be a problem so I've tried a number of things to minimize it.
The first thing I did was try to set up a read-only virtual disk with my older archive information. I figured that if it was read only, it wouldn't get it's modification time set and would only be backed up once. The problem was that there doesn't seem to be any way to make a virtual disk read only. I tried setting the read-only permissions in Leopard but then VMWare tells me there's insufficient permissions to access the disk. I've searched for some flag I could set in the VMDK file to mark the disk as read only but was unable to find one.
I also tried using a virtual disk that was broken up into mulitple smaller files. I thought that maybe only the files that actually get changed would have their modification date set. No luck. All the files get their modification date set as soon as you boot the VM.
The next thing I tried was taking a snapshot. That seems to keep the main drive from being changed and all changed data goes to a second set of files. That worked but if I actually need to do a snapshot for some reason, I have to merge the old one back into the main file before I can take the new snapshot. That can be time consuming depending on how long it's been since the snapshot was taken and it makes the snapshot feature less usefull. It also seems like I would take a performance hit. There's already a pretty big performance hit running a Windows VM under Fusion so I'd rather not add to it.
I ended up telling TimeMachine to ignore the Virual machines directory and I'm backing them up manually. This isn't the ideal solution but it's the best I could come up with.
There are some things that VMware could do to minimise the problem. First, if you've got a multiple file drive, don't write to one of the files unless you actually have to. Right now, all the files in the set get marked with the same modificiation time and date as soon as you boot the VM. I can't belive that you actually need to modify all ten of the 2 GB files in my 20gb set. Second, allow some way to set a virtual disk to read-only or allow mounting of disks with read-only permissions. I could greatly reduce the size of my working folder by splitting out things that don't change but there's no point the way it currently works.
It's very possible that I'm missing something that would solve the problem but I've searched the internet for hours now and haven't been able to find anything.
Better documentation would be nice. I know that Fusion is supposed to be more Apple like so you've removed a lot of the options. I really hate that! I'm forced to edit the vmdk file to make changes that should be possible through the menus. Lets take the example of trying to mount an existing virtual disk so that you can copy data from it to a new virtual machine. Under VMWare Server on Windows, you just add an existing disk. Under Fusion, it's not an option. It tries to automatically create a new disk and sticks it's own name in the box. If you try to type in the name of an existing disk, you get an error. The only way to do it is to edit the vmdk file directly which is a PITA and could really mess things up.
And what's with the unsizeable dialog box? After I've manually edited in the existing virtual disk, I go to the VMware settings and I get this little greyed out text box showing just the first part of the path with no way to expand it to see the rest. Aggggg!
Oops, sorry. I'm starting to piss myself off again. I didn't mean to turn this post into a rant. It's just frustrating to see a software's usabiity reduced in the name of making it simple. There are better ways of simplifying a user interface than just taking away important functions! (Advanced settings button anyone?)
Anyway if anyone has any better suggestions for how to make Fusion play nicely with TimeMachine, I'd love to hear them.
