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Yes ^^ this ^^, virtual machines have been a good way to learn how useful and easy snapshots are. With APFS snapshots have come to the hardware level and that

by wila 9y ago

Yes ^^ this ^^, virtual machines have been a good way to learn how useful and easy snapshots are. With APFS snapshots have come to the hardware level and that is really exciting. But beware that this is not a backup. If you loose your main disk then you still might have lost your data. Time machine can help very well here. Regular TM backups are a good way of protecting yourself against data loss. Unless.. we're talking VMs again. In that particular scenario it turns out that VMs and Time Machine do not go that well together. VMware even advices you to exclude your virtual machines from VMs [0] and [1]. The problem is that your VM consists of large binary files that change over time. If TM makes a backup it will always see your VM as changed and start copying the virtual disk files. Problem is that if the machine is running that the risk is high that you end up with corrupt virtual disks in your time machine. Another problem is that if your TM backup storage runs out of storage space. TM can delete part of your virtual disks. Another problem is that with VMs you run out of disk space really quick. Anyways I'm getting off topic. Probably because I wrote Vimalin [2] to backup VM's for VMware Fusion and counter the VM backup issues ;) [0] https://kb.vmware.com/kb/1013628 https://kb.vmware.com/kb/1013628 [1] https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Fusion/10.0/com.vmware.fusion.using.doc/GUID-644C040A-0831-483F-9A06-EE970C2F9FF6.html https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Fusion/10.0/com.vmware.fus... [2] https://www.vimalin.com https://www.vimalin.com

walterbell 9y ago
How does Vimalin backup in-use virtual disks, or deal with the large binary files that have only small differences?
- wila 9y ago
  It depends on VMware Fusion snapshot functionality. As such it is not a problem to make backups of a running virtual machine. The way it works is that it makes a temporary snapshot of the VM when it is running. Parts of the disk from before the snapshot are now closed and new data is written as Copy on Write. The data that is safe to copy (which includes your VM state and memory) is then copied to your backup location. After Vimalin is finished copying the data it will also commit that temporary snapshot. On restoring a backup it gets back to the state from before the backup started, just like with a snapshot, except this was written on an external disk. You can schedule when it is convenient for you to run the backups. Like Time Machine it makes full copies of the disks. But because you can schedule how many copies you want to keep you can prevent your backup storage from getting overrun.

by wila 9y ago

walterbell 9y ago

How does Vimalin backup in-use virtual disks, or deal with the large binary files that have only small differences?

wila 9y ago
It depends on VMware Fusion snapshot functionality. As such it is not a problem to make backups of a running virtual machine. The way it works is that it makes a temporary snapshot of the VM when it is running. Parts of the disk from before the snapshot are now closed and new data is written as Copy on Write. The data that is safe to copy (which includes your VM state and memory) is then copied to your backup location. After Vimalin is finished copying the data it will also commit that temporary snapshot. On restoring a backup it gets back to the state from before the backup started, just like with a snapshot, except this was written on an external disk. You can schedule when it is convenient for you to run the backups. Like Time Machine it makes full copies of the disks. But because you can schedule how many copies you want to keep you can prevent your backup storage from getting overrun.