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Windows virtual machine on mac - backing up

  • 29-09-2008 7:51pm
    #1
    ash2008
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 179 ✭✭


    Hey,

    ive googled to try find an answer but cant seem to find anything straight forward. I have vmware fusion, and ive set up win xp as a virtual machine.
    I also have an external hard drive, and i want to back up my windows vm cos ive installed some software on it, and if anything crashes it would be a real pain to install everything again.
    Can i just copy the .vmwarevm file to my external hard drive? I have a FAT partition on my hard drive (small enough partition, but i heard that this is the format for being able to use with both pc and mac- i could be wrong tho)

    any help appreciated, thanks:)


Comments

  • #2
    deevey
    Closed Accounts Posts: 707 ✭✭✭deevey


    The only thing is there is the limitation with Fat32 of a 4gigs filesize, anything above thats and you'll run into issues.

    Could you set up a mac partition on your external .. or do you need the VM to run on a windows machine too ?

    Hope this helps ..


  • #3
    ash2008
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 179 ✭✭ash2008


    hi,
    thanks for the reply..actually i dont necessarily need to use my vm on windows...i just thought it might come in handy sometimes.:p
    The most important is just to have a backup


  • #4
    J-blk
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 3,906 ✭✭✭J-blk


    I use VMWare Fusion too and it has a "Snapshot" feature built in, which you can use to create a backup of the VM as is, e.g before the installation of new software, so you can then restore it from within Fusion. If you've upgraded to Fusion 2.0 (which is a free upgrade for 1.x users and has a ton of updates), the "Snapshot" feature can be set up to automatically backup at timed intervals, essentially mimicking Time Machine for any VMs you have.


  • #5
    ZENER
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 6,163 ✭✭✭ZENER


    Not sure if this is of any help but I use Parallels Desktop and TimeMachine backs up the winxp.hdd file with every backup.

    If you don't have TimeMachine set up then you could just copy the hard disk image used by VMWare to the external drive. Obviously you'll need to be aware of file size limits of the filesystem used on the external drive as the image could be over 4GB - Mine is about 12GB.
    Mine are on MacOS Extended Drives.

    ZEN


  • #6
    merkuree
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 105 ✭✭merkuree


    if you plan to move the pc partition to another pc partition, another pc or to another vm machine....I have had good results with winclone.


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