Archives: October 17, 2018

Wil van Antwerpen
October 17, 2018

Backup your VMware Fusion VMs, even when they are still running

Making a backup can be problematic

Taking care of the data and time you invested in a virtual machine (VM) is one of the problems. In other words make sure to have good backups. For Time Machine, VMware recommends you to exclude virtual machines as you can’t make good backups with it (see [1] and [2]). The problem is similar with normal backup products on Windows.

You cannot normally make a backup of a machine that is still running. The reason is that the copy of the virtual disk would likely end up being corrupted. This is because there is a high chance that the disk is changed while you are copying the virtual disk file(s). File systems do not like that.

Some alternative solutions

A suggestion is to move your data out of the VM and save it at your host while accessing it via shared folders. This by itself breaks the encapsulation of a VM – have everything in one package. On top of that, shared folders aren’t very performant. Not an ideal solution either.

Of course you can make a manual copy of the VM when it has been shut down, but that means having to set aside time to do so. Now you also have to make sure to not forget doing so on a regular time.

Wouldn’t it be neat if you could make easy backups of your VMs in an automatic way and not having to worry if you left them running or not?

Enter Vimalin

The above got me thinking and work on a product called “Vimalin”.

With Vimalin you can schedule backups of your virtual machines. Vimalin uses VMware automation to detect if the virtual machine is running or not. If the VM is running at a time when the backup is scheduled then Vimalin knows about that. In that scenario it uses VMware snapshot technology to be able to make a consistent virtual disk copy. In that case it also copies the machine state and memory contents from your VM.

As a result when restoring the VM, you end up with a restored machine that looks exactly like it was suspended at the time of the backup. It does this all by using VMware automation and does not require you to install an agent in the VM. Both VMware Fusion as well as VMware Workstation Professional are supported.

You can read more about how to use Vimalin (including screen shots) in the online documentation

or you can download the latest version from our download page and test drive it for yourself.

There is a 60 day trial period. After 60 days it changes into the free version which still allows you to make backups or restore them, but it disables the scheduling and email notifications feature.

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Wil van Antwerpen
October 4, 2018

Free Vimalin 2.6 license for vExperts

Congratulations with your 2021 VMware vExpert award!

We do appreciate your efforts and contributions to the VMware community and therefor like to give you a free NFR license to Vimalin 2.6.

Whether you use VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation or VMware Player. Vimalin can help you with automatic backups of your virtual machines.

With Vimalin you can run the backups of your VMs automatically without worrying that you forgot to make that manual copy. You don’t even have to stop your VM as it happily makes a backup while the VM is running.

More details can be found at the main site.

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    1 Comment on Free Vimalin 2.6 license for vExperts InNFR
    Wil van Antwerpen
    January 7, 2018

    Import backup targets

    One of the main new features of our latest release (version 1.0.298 see download page) is the ability to import backups.

    Normally Vimalin keeps track of all your backups in a database and based on the data in there it will show you an overview of all the backups you currently have. Those backups can be on different disks and/or network locations.

    That works great. But what now if you happen to do a fresh install of macOS and you don’t have that old database available? Then Vimalin would not be able to locate those previously made backups. Until now.

    Another scenario is if you have multiple machines that you backup via Vimalin. Normally you only see your own backups. Vimalin stores the backups per host, and the database is stored locally so normally you do not see backups from other hosts.

    If you want to put back a backup from another host then there was no easy way to do that. This new feature also makes this much easier.

    So how does it work?

    If you add a backup Disk Target then Vimalin will now verify if it has been used by Vimalin before and if it has it displays the following popup:

    If you select “Yes” then it will scan the contents of the Disk target and report back what if found.

    You can then verify what backup have been found in the backup archive screen:

    As you can see in our example it found 2 backups of 2 VMs. The first one is a backup that was made onDemand earlier today while the other one is a backup of Win98 made yesterday.

    Note that it will only add backups not already in your database and that it will verify if all the files that make up the database are available. You can even remove the target and add it back to sync with the disk target.

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