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Time Machine Backups Yosemite - w/ Virtual Box
Posted: 31. Jan 2015, 21:07
by servant119b
I just upgraded my iMac to Yosemite and I am wondering about Time Machine Backups with Virtual Box. I run Windows 7 on Virtual Box. Before, I used Parallels but they want me to buy another version in order to use Yosemite. Virtual Box is free. With Parallels, each time Time Machine did a backup, it was like 40 GB, because it copied the whole Windows file even if only a slight change was made to it. This was eating up my external hard drive space that Time Machine was using to put the backups on. I changed the settings in Parallels to make it Time Machine friendly and the problem was solved.
Do I need to do this in Virtual Box? If so, how?
If Virtual Box doesn't have settings for Time Machine, what is the simplest way to deal with this issue?
Thanks ahead of time for your help.
Re: Time Machine Backups Yosemite - w/ Virtual Box
Posted: 31. Jan 2015, 21:31
by ChipMcK
VirtualBox does not have any "settings" for OS X Time Machine.
Time Machine has had the ability to exclude files, folders and partitions (disks) for many years.
Re: Time Machine Backups Yosemite - w/ Virtual Box
Posted: 14. Feb 2015, 06:27
by Mark92630
Yes, you do need to do this for VirtualBox, otherwise it will cause the same behavior in Time Machine that you describe for Parallels: change one byte in the virtual hard disk, and the entire 40GB (or whatever) will be flagged by Time Machine for backup.
"How" is how Chip said. Go to System Preferences, Time Machine, Options, and exclude the folder "VirtualBox VMs" from backup. That folder is located immediately under your main <myusername> folder. Once you do this, there are a couple of precautions to take, in the event of either a hard drive failure, or in case Apple Support at some time in the future asks you to restore your entire HD from Time Machine.
1. Do a non-Time Machine backup of your VirtualBox VMs folder to an external drive, because otherwise, you will have no backup of it, at all. You need to do this only once, although you might want to refresh it every several months or so.
2. Do on-going backups of changed Windows application data to a Shared Folder (which will then be picked up by Time Machine and saved). Or use some other mechanism to backup new Windows content directly from your Guest OS as you generate it.