VMWaqre snapshots vs backups
July 12th, 2008 RustyI’m a little confused this evening as I repeat the process of shrinking my Virtual Machine. I had copied my VM’s from my internal HD to my newly formatted (Mac OS Extended (journaled)) and then defragged my 72G Vista image. I then tried to sdelete the drive to clear out unused space when I inadvertently ran out of space on the external hardrive. I had to kill VMWare. Suprisingly, the VM came back up without an issue. The image is now 97G. Not exactly what I was after. Aparently, sdelete uses a lot of temp space and it left it allocated.
I decided to repeat the process on my internal harddrive and then copy the result to the external. Yes, I’ll copy the image before I sdelete.
So that leads me to my question regarding snapshots. VMWare Fusion supports one snapshot per VM. Once you create one, you cannot shrink your disk. When you discard a snapshot, it takes for-freakin-ever for VMWare to “clean deleted files”.
Assuming you had some free space on a drive somewhere, why would you use snapshots at all rather than the very easy, fast “copy the file” and backup the whole thing. You ca have as many copies as you have space so there’s no “single snap limitation”.
If you could maintain multiple snapshots, or branched machines like in VirtualPC, then there’s a point to using them. I just don’t see the point in Fusion and wish I wasn’t waiting fr those deleted files to be cleaned up. Thought that’s what I was doing by deleting them 
Tags: VMWare