Hi Wil,

Thank you for your answer, can you please clarify this:

1) You mean that my backups may come out corrupted if I try to backup a live running VM (which is obvious, of course) or is it also true for a paused VM? (i.e. when I back it up while the hypervisor is shut down)

2) What happens if I have a paused split file VM consisting of ten 2GB files which I run, then browse 2-3 websites from it, and then pause it again: will the hypervisor write data to just a few of those ten 2GB files, or will it write to all of them? (again, all things being equal) I am asking this question because I learned that the backup software I use (Owncloud desktop client) cannot analyze the contents of files for changes and upload only those changes to the server. Instead, it calculates file hashes to find out if the files were changed since the last check, and if they were, it simply re-uploads them entirely anew. Right now I have to re-upload my monolithic 30GB file VM each time after I use it and I am wondering if splitting it into 2GB files would make things a bit faster. What do you think?

3) If I change my mind after some time and decide to return to a monolithic file VM from a split file VM, would that be possible?

Thank you!