Fusion or Parallels ... which one is better for VM backup?

[edgardito]

HI,
i have a small (64GB) SSD.
I have a 20GB Fusion VM with Windows XP, Visual Studio 2008, and some other IDEs (mainly for PocketPC development).

I have 16GB available on my mini, and i have all my media (music, videos, photos) on an external USB HD.

The thing is I want to have a new VM with Linux, and i need another VM file. Since i wont be running both VM at the same time, I think I need to backup the VM to the external Drive.

Here is the catch... the Drive is FAT32 formated (I used to connect this drive to my PC Laptop). When i try to copy the VM file to the USB Drive, it get corrupted in the process and the copy fails.

Is anybody doing something like this with Parellels?

[Fox]

I can't answer the question about Parallels, but have you considered partitioning the external drive and then formatting the extra partition GUID for Mac files? I don't know if Disk Utility would allow you to do this, but if you are running Linux, the program, Gparted will do this for you.

One other caution with vm backup. If you have snapshots of your vm, it tends to divide the vm into bits, and I'm not sure if this gives you a proper backup. If not, you can consolidate your vm by deleting the snapshots.
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Mini 1: 2.3 ghz Core i5; 8 gb RAM, Corsair 240gb SSD, 500 gb Seagate XT
Mini 2: 2.26 ghz Core 2 duo, 8 gb RAM, 500 gb Seagate
Also a Cube, 13" MacBook Air, 20" 2.66 ghz iMac & 11.6" Acer 1810TZ running Ubuntu & openSuse

[MacDSmith2]

I believe you need to have an OS/X formatted drive to take the Parallels VM file as it really is a container. Fusion is likely the same way. I have both on my Mac Mini and it doesn't surprise me that moving the file to a FAT32 partition messed something up.
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[edgardito]