virtualbox.org

I apologize if this has been answered elsewhere - I'm sure it probably has, but I was having difficulty sorting through all of the posts mentioning "backup."

I'm running XP on a Mac, as our museum collection's software requires Windows. I'm installing a external hard drive and setting it up as our Time Machine on the mac host...will this automatically save all things we do on the XP guest or do I need to do something extra? Thank you.

Considering the size of a virtual disk and that same virtual disk may be split into 2GB files with each independently backed up (out of synch),
are you sure that you want to depend on time machine to maintain an accurate back-up of a moving (running) target?

For my needs,
1. Shutdown the VM
2. Copy, or duplicate (Ctrl-Click), the folder for the VM; external volume for better "archiving"

Thanks for the advice. We have a 1TB external, of which 95% is to be dedicated to the VM backup. So size is not an issue, but will it be difficult to get it to automatically backup?

The main problem here is that many of our workers are not computer savvy, and I don't expect to be here forever so I'd prefer to get everything as automatic as possible so there is no worry if they forget to back up the VM archive manually. Advice?