Adventures In Time (Machine), Fusion defused…

The fun began when I initially tried to re-partition the drive, using Boot Camp Assistant, it said I had errors on my disk, and to repair them before preceding, so I break out the Leopard install disk, fix the errors, and try again… The message there are errors on your hard drive reappears, since I have been having just the most minor of problems with Leopard, more annoyances then anything else, I decide to just do a complete reload of my machine, kill 2 birds with one stone. Everything goes as advertised, system installs like a champ, I reload all my data from the Time Machine backup apparently without issue, except for one. 

I reboot the machine, and attempt to login, and no response to my old password, easy fix, reboot the Leopard disk, and use the Password reset utility, works like a champ, and I am back to operating just like I was before, and I am using a lot less hard disk space, a lot less (~50GB) then 5-10GB or so I expected to recover I took off all the languages which is 2GB right there. So I could not believe that I had that much lost space on the drive, were talking 25% of the total drive, and probably 35%+ of how much data I had prior to re formating. So I start to look around,and all my stuff appears to be fine, until I get to the VMWare Fusion Virtual Machines Folder, both of the Virtual devices are no longer there, I look at the backup drive, nope not there either, but it is not really that big of a deal, because I did a full retrospect backup at work earlier in the day, but I really want to know why. In my search of why, I come across this little gem “Enabling back time machine for vmware fusion images“. It would have been nice of VMWare to make that point a little clearer somewhere that the VM files are not backed up. I guess it is a good thing that I did that back up. I think that this is something that should be made a lot clearer, and yes I was stupid for trusting that those files were backed by Time Machine like Parallels does. 

The good thing is that my MacBook is apparently running faster, I did recover about 6Gig of space, Time Machine did exactly what it was supposed to, and the only failure here is VMWare Fusion, and the fact that it tells Time Machine to exclude it, but doesn’t tell the user, in the final docs, but there is mention of it in the beat release notes http://www.vmware.com/beta/fusion/releasenotes_fusion.html#issues of course I like the reference that something that is a major feature of the OS is interfering with fusion, and we’ll just exclude ourselves from it. I intentionally exclude parallels from time machine, but I do include it anytime I do major updates, probably about once every 2 or 3 months, but that is my choice….