1. Declan Lynch04/04/2008 12:54:45 PM
Homepage: http://www.qtzar.com

Interesting that you should post this today. I just read that VMWARE was automatically marking it's file to be excluded from a TimeMachine backup. Probably due to the size and that just starting the VM would make it a changed file and thus your TimeMachine drive would fill very quickly.

Here's some info on it and also a way to list the files that are excluded from TimeMachine { Link }

2. Declan Lynch04/04/2008 01:01:58 PM
Homepage: http://www.qtzar.com

Here is some emor information and a method to make sure Time Machine does indeed backup your VM's : { Link }

3. Wild Bill04/04/2008 01:27:23 PM
Homepage: http://www.billbuchan.com

Yup. Dec's way ahead of me. Understandable, as VM images are huge, and will always change.

I also run Mozy (mozy.com) inside my VM's, and of course all notes work is replicated onto servers. I also tend to take snapshots now and again...

Time to get an SSD disk ? No moving parts..

--* Bill

4. Rob Novak04/04/2008 02:19:12 PM
Homepage: http://www.LotusRockStar.com

@Dec - that's right now I remember, VMWare Fusion added the 'exclusion" to 1.1, which I installed after the first HD replacement. So that explains why it's not there.

My new one is creating 2 GB files, as it's writing to a FAT USB drive. I haven't found anything saying it's better or worse as separate files, so I'm planning to use them instead.

@Bill, I'm all over SSD - as soon as they're >200GB!

5. Turtle04/04/2008 04:52:57 PM
Homepage: http://www.weightlessdog.com/shell.nsf

Yep, I lost a VMware image when I put the 320gb drive in the MacBook Pro. No major loss, though, because I still kinda prefer Parallels. I *have* ditched my BootCamp partition finally.

6. David Killingsworth04/09/2008 05:27:01 AM
Homepage: http://domino.symetrikdesign.com

I share your pain. I converted to a Mac Powerbook in August 2006. I loved the machine with great passion after the first 2 week learning curve of trying to find all the shareware/freeware utilities (that don't really exist for mac) that I thought I needed because I always needed them on the PC, only to realize that all the functionality is built into the operating system.

13 months (1 month out of warranty) later, my hard drive crashed a horrible death. What's worse, is that I had a 250GB external firewire drive sitting next to the laptop on the table and had only made a full backup, when I first got the external drive.

I lost tons of time consuming graphic design and video editing work, plus lots of PHP code from the prior 3 months where I was doing an excessive amount of work. I was devastated.

I replaced the drive, took the disk to a "lab" that was unable to get anything off of the old drive. I had used this machine quite alot and bumped it around, so I wasn't so surprised that it had gone.

15 months later, this happened again. I had made backups a couple of different times to the external drive, so the loss wasn't so bad, but I still lost quite a bit of stuff for a 6 months period (some small graphic design jobs), and Inbox/Sent mail which I hadn't backed up. This time it wasn't that bad, because I was doing alot of Lotus Notes/Domino work at the office on a PC, and not so much personal freelance work on the mac.

It was very frustrating for this to have happened a second time.

I also have to say that this has made my love for mac and apple lose alot of luster.

The second time, again, I was not able to recover any data.

The guy at the apple authorized repair shop/dealer sold me a hitachi drive this time, so hopefully things will go better.

The worst part about all of this, is that there was no warning AT ALL. No clicking drive heads, nothing.