Does anyone have a working backup strategy for the VMs?

[lukele]

I would like to regularly backup my VMs but unsure if there's a good way how to do that.
Incremental backups don't really seem possible, since afaik it's a single large file instead of a bundle (similar to a sparse bundle) with small files.

Does anyone have experience with that? Some hints how to approach?

An alternative could also be to have all important files in mounted folders, and some kind of bootstrap process for the VMs that installs basic applications needed. If anyone has suggestions for that scenario as well, I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks!

[marksink]

I take advantage of APFS cloning and use cron. I have a backup every 3 hrs for past 24 hrs, and a backup every day for the past week. I also have Carbon Copy Cloner which will copy the current VM, and the 'Monday' file to a different drive. The cron statements below end up creating these files:

drwxr-xr-x@ 7 staff 224 Nov 23 00:00 Torrent Mac_00.vbvm
drwxr-xr-x@ 7 staff 224 Nov 23 03:00 Torrent Mac_03.vbvm
drwxr-xr-x@ 7 staff 224 Nov 23 06:00 Torrent Mac_06.vbvm
drwxr-xr-x@ 7 staff 224 Nov 23 09:00 Torrent Mac_09.vbvm
drwxr-xr-x@ 7 staff 224 Nov 23 12:00 Torrent Mac_12.vbvm
drwxr-xr-x@ 7 staff 224 Nov 22 15:00 Torrent Mac_15.vbvm
drwxr-xr-x@ 7 staff 224 Nov 22 18:00 Torrent Mac_18.vbvm
drwxr-xr-x@ 7 staff 224 Nov 22 21:00 Torrent Mac_21.vbvm
drwxr-xr-x@ 7 staff 224 Nov 22 06:00 Torrent Mac_Friday.vbvm
drwxr-xr-x@ 7 staff 224 Nov 18 06:00 Torrent Mac_Monday.vbvm
drwxr-xr-x@ 7 staff 224 Nov 23 06:00 Torrent Mac_Saturday.vbvm
drwxr-xr-x@ 7 staff 224 Nov 17 06:00 Torrent Mac_Sunday.vbvm
drwxr-xr-x@ 7 staff 224 Nov 21 06:00 Torrent Mac_Thursday.vbvm
drwxr-xr-x@ 7 staff 224 Nov 19 06:00 Torrent Mac_Tuesday.vbvm
drwxr-xr-x@ 7 staff 224 Nov 20 06:00 Torrent Mac_Wednesday.vbvm

Backup hourly every 3 hrs:
0 */3 * * * rm -rf "/Volumes/970EVO_SSD_1TB/VirtualBuddy/backups/Torrent Mac_$(date +%H).vbvm" ; cp -cR "/Volumes/970EVO_SSD_1TB/VirtualBuddy/Torrent Mac.vbvm" "/Volumes/970EVO_SSD_1TB/VirtualBuddy/backups/Torrent Mac_$(date +%H).vbvm"

Backup daily at 6 am:
0 6 * * * rm -rf "/Volumes/970EVO_SSD_1TB/VirtualBuddy/backups/Torrent Mac_$(date +%A).vbvm" ; cp -cR "/Volumes/970EVO_SSD_1TB/VirtualBuddy/Torrent Mac.vbvm" "/Volumes/970EVO_SSD_1TB/VirtualBuddy/backups/Torrent Mac_$(date +%A).vbvm"