The documentation says it will remove the oldest data first. A problem arises when your Time Machine backup disk starts to run out of disk space. No open files, no problems right? Unfortunately here is another caveat. What if you manually copy your shut down virtual machine to a separate folder, so that Time Machine can back it up. Even if you do that, you still have a problem. This is one of the tips in VMware’s Knowledge base best practices for virtual machine backup This is also mentioned by many old timers at the VMware Fusion forum. So you do the proper thing and you exclude virtual machines from backups.
#VMWARE FUSION TRIAL LENGTH UPDATE#
The update to your Time Machine backup however is gigabytes. So pretend that you just saved a small document. This means that when Time Machine makes a backup, it will see the whole virtual disk has changed even if you only changed a small file.
#VMWARE FUSION TRIAL LENGTH SERIES#
See more in the excellent Time Machine series by Howard Oakley: Time Machine 15: Large files including VMs Changes in large filesĪnother issue is that virtual disks are large binary files. On top of that APFS snapshots have their own issues. You will still lose the active state of the VM (RAM is not copied) and the backup will be like you pulled the power plug on a running machine. Sadly this doesn’t mean that your backups are safe or that TM is the right tool for the job. In the most recent versions of macOS, the actual copying of a running VM is less dangerous due to APFS disk snapshots. In other words, the file written out as backup is different from what it is on your machine. The reason for that is that the virtual machine can still write data to files while the backup process runs. When your virtual machine is running while TM makes a backup, it might end up being corrupt. Some of these files, the virtual disks, are quite large.
A virtual machine consists of a set of files. Let’s see what makes up a virtual machine. There’s quite a list of reasons for this. Unfortunately however, it is not very suitable for keeping correct backups of your virtual machines. That is pretty amazing and makes it wonderful for many people. Basically it is a matter of set and forget. Time Machine is an incredibly nice backup program.
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