VM on External Hard Drive? Copy snapshots to External Hard Drive?

[WTig3ner]

I run VMware Workstation 14 on a Linux box, with a Windows 10 VM.  Is it possible to have the VM on an external hard drive rather than the SSD that contains both the Linux OS and the Workstation program itself? 

Also, is it possible to copy the latest snapshot to a separate drive for possible later restoration?  I ask because if the drive containing Workstation goes bad, the snapshots don't help much.  I have no reason to think that the SSD is going to go bad any time soon (or ever), but if I wait until there is reason to think it's going or has gone bad, it's already too late.

Thanks.

[continuum]

> Is it possible to have the VM on an external hard drive rather than the SSD that contains both the Linux OS and the Workstation program itself? 
Yes - sure. It is highly recommended to store your VMs on another physical drive to spread the load. External USB-disks are often to slow to be fun to work with but other internal harddisks are fine.
> Also, is it possible to copy the latest snapshot to a separate drive for possible later restoration?
Sure - but keep in mind that snapshots ARE NO backups. On the contrary - the more snapshots you have the more fragile the VMs actually is.
So keep the number of snapshots as low as necessary/possible  and copy the complete VM-directory to a safe location when you want to create a backup.

[wila]

Hello,

A snapshot is not what you think it is.

It is basically a point to turn back in time.

The disk state of that time is made immutable and any changes made after that time are written to a new virtual disk.

That new virtual disk ONLY has the changes since that frozen time frame.

Saving a snapshot on another disk is not saving your data really if you do not have the earlier moments.

To use that "frozen in time" analogy.

If you freeze a moment in time when somebody walks through a house... then only save the changes.. and then loose everything except those changes you just see some person walking somewhere. But as there's no house.. you've not got anything useful. If you're lucky there's still some data that can be used (after some serious recovery work) but most likely all you have left is noise.

It is best to make full backups. You can make a backup of a VM by:

- shut down the VM

- copy the full folder holding every part of the VM to another disk or network location

--

Wil