How to back up your VMs

QHow should I back up my Parallels’ virtual machines (VMs)?

ADon’t use Time Machine, even in Big Sur, as it’s optimised for hourly backups. VMs are huge, usually many gigabytes, and constantly change when in use. Although Time Machine to APFS should only copy changes rather than the whole file, by the time it’s finished doing that, many will only have changed again. The backup is therefore likely to be unusable, and will consume free space on your backup storage.

You should only back up a VM is when it’s not in use, for example at the end of the day. Use a tool such as Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! to make a straight copy. You probably won’t want to keep many older versions, so you can economise there as well.

Add the folder(s) containing all your Virtual Machines to Time Machine’s exclusion list, as you’ll back them up separately. Create a new task in CCC to back your VM folder up, preferably once a day when the VMs there aren’t in use.