I use Macbook Air and Lion. I use Time Machine to back up on my Drobo FS. All seems to be ok until I use Parallels. The Time Machine seems to take my virtual machine as one file so every time I open it Time machine wants to back up the WHOLE virtual machine although I maybe have changed only a word in a file. This leads to huge back ups of 20-30 G. Is there anything I can do about this unnecessary backup? Or is there any way I can tell the Time Machine not to back up my Windows files? Can I use tmutil and in that case how?
Camilla
Best Answer
Parallels have instructions here for making their software (version 6 or later) work better with Time Machine. You can either optimise your VMs for Time Machine backup, or disable backup for them.
In Parallels 7 the control panel looks like this:
Note that when you enable this feature, it will take up more space on the disk. Also, Auto Compress will be disabled.