Best Practice: Archiving/Backup VMs

[KFlash]

Hi folks,

is there a best practice to archive/backup virtual machines? (I would like to store them on my NAS)

I first was thinking about using a Version Control Manager like git/svn. But as I heared it is not a good idea, because those (binary) disk files change rapidly and would render git/svn useless.

Another idea was to set up a kind of cron-job that copies my VMs in regular intervals in archive folders. If you use 2 or more archive folders and copy in a "roling" way (overwrite the oldest version) it would give some security and still be simple to achieve. Con: It would use 2-n times the space of the original machine.

Other ideas?

[ChipMcK]

• Shut down the VM
  Copy the VM's Finder folder/directory to wherever (Ctrl-Click --> Duplicate works also)