Best Practice for backing up a configured Virtual PC

Question

I would like to backup my current configured VM, the one I"m now using for Development, and would like to hear a few suggestions concerning the options available to me.

I recently started using a Virtual PC in my Windows 7 environment to develop apps using VS 2005. I have not had a lot of luck getting VS 2005 to run in Win7 as it would continually lock up on me. This was the reason I purchased a version of Win 7 that came with a Win XP Mode Virtual PC (Win XP VM).

When I first started the Win XP VM, the first thing I did is install every MS update and hotfix available to it. Then I created a new VM using differencing based on the updated Win XP VM. Then I installed my development tools on it.

Now that I've gotten VS2005 installed and working, with all the tools I'd need (The Vault, Refactor! Pro, CodeRush and CodeSMART) I'd like to make a backup of that VM.

I tried merging the Dev VM HD to a new file, but I keep getting a warning about disk space. This is my first option if I could get it to work. I tried merging it with the parent disk. Disk space error again.

I have a new PC, but the purchaser determined that a 350g HD would be big enough, and that all the memory I'd need would be 4G for a win7 64bit OS. Which may be true if I didn't need to use VM's. So wrong that I'm getting ready to spend about $150 of my bonus to upgrade to 12G and a 1TB drive{secondary?], but that is a few weeks away at best. If I could afford it I"d also upgrade to VMWare Workstation. I've used and loved it.

I've tried moving the VM's to an external HD and to a network share, both of which caused the Win XP VM to run slow as molasses.

All comments welcome.

Thanks.

Marshall

Answer 1

For the time being backup your (entire) VM files on the host machine to the external hard disk. Assuming you're not working 24/24 you can find a time slot for that.

If you don't want to backup your entire VM that often you can run backup software from within the VM and e.g. use that to backup your sources.

Using both methods you have some incremental and full backups.

Also get a bigger internal HD, because you can't even merge your VM.

And show the 'purchaser' the reactions to this post, because he/she still has to learn the emaning of "penny wise, pound foolish".