I am a heavy VM user and I have been using a sparse bundle to house all of my VMs so I can control their size allocation. One thing I do know is that TM will backup incrementally to my FW800 drive of any changed bands within the bundle which is a huge benefit for me. One thing that concerns me is does it make any difference in the backup if the sparse bundle is currently mounted when TM backs up the system? What about the locked bands for writing? I would assume at the next schedule the locked bands would eventually get backed up.

Every morning, I turn on my MBP and then connect my FW800 drives. I have one for SD to do the full copy of the system and another for TM. Both drives are the same size as the internal drive 750GB. In any event I am double sure about recovering from a dead internal hard drive. When SD clones the drive, it does does the complete backup of the system with the sparse bundle not mounted and the same goes for TM. Once complete I then mount the sparse bundle and use the VMs inside of it. I leave TM to do its thing during the day until I turn off the MBP.

So the question is, is it better to backup a sparse bundle when its not mounted or mounted?

Thanks

ImToast

I think you're covered either way, I've done similar type stuff for a long time and even had to do a recovery or two and I never had a problem when recovering whether the sparsebundle was mounted or not. VM's are a bit of a different story in that sometimes you might have to jump through a few hoops if you try to recover a backup of a VM made while it was running (digging through the .vmx to toss away bits but I think most VM host software has even rectified that these days).

Sounds like a decent backup strategy? Got offsite? :D

Sounds like a decent backup strategy? Got offsite? :D

12TB NAS at home over 1GigE done every Sunday. :D

12TB NAS at home over 1GigE done every Sunday. :D

:clap:

After some thought about my backup strategy. I decided to exclude the sparse bundle from TM backing up the store saving me plenty of storage on my TM drive and extended archival storage. The sparse bundle will be backed up by SD as part of the smart backup routine I do every morning before I start using the store. Less change is less time to backup for TM, but the full SD backup remains the same.

ImToast