Autoprotect does nothing on one guest

[gworboys]

Host and guest are Windows 10 x64 1903.  Using VMware Workstationg v15.5.1

I turned on AutoProtect and continued working in the comfortable knowledge that I had some extra protection against some host stability problems that I am still trying to resolve.  But it turns out it does nothing on one particular guest.

I am guessing it is not working because this guest has an extra volume that is set as a persistent disk.  Normal snapshots happily take snapshots of the main (C:) volume and ignore the persistent, but (it seems that) for some reason AutoProtect won't do this ... which might be forgivable if it told me.

Is anyone able to confirm this is expected behaviour, or should I be looking for some other reason?

[continuum]

> I turned on AutoProtect and continued working in the comfortable knowledge that I had some extra protection against some host stability problems that I am still trying to resolve.

Autoprotect does NOT protect your VM at all.

It just creates more snapshots then any experienced user would use.

I highly recommend to turn off Autoprotect for all VMs - by the way : long term WS-users nicname this feature Autodestruct for good reasons.

[gworboys]

Are you saying that the snapshots created by AutoProtect may lead to corruption of the virtual machine?  (If not that, then how/why does it qualify for "AutoDestruct"?)

I can understand that excess of snapshots will lead to performance issues - but while I still have the host freezing at irregular intervals, that seemed like an acceptable trade off given some of the issues I've had with VM recovery after the host restarts.  (Eventually I hope to resolve the host problems, but it only happens every few days (on average), so it's hard to debug.  I suspect a hardware problem, but so far my testing has turned up nothing.  Meanwhile I am trying to reduce the risk to the VMs - obviously I have backups too but it's easier to revert to a snapshot than restore entire VMs, )

I am still curious as to whether the AutoProtect behaviour is intentional.  As I said, normal snapshots work on this machine (albeit, obviously, they ignore the persistent volume), so it seems odd that AutoProtect doesn't work.

[continuum · Accepted solution]

> Are you saying that the snapshots created by AutoProtect may lead to corruption of the virtual machine?  (If not that, then how/why does it qualify for "AutoDestruct"?)

YES - and we have seen that so often that I call the feature AUTODESTRUCT.

I agree with your theory - I think that the one vmdk with persistent flag prevents the function.

[gworboys]

Thanks for your response.  I've marked it as the correct answer since turning off AutoProtect (which I have just done) makes the problem meaningless.