I'm supporting an office that is using Fusion to run a popular Non-Profit software package called GiftWorks, as well as the Windows version of QuickBooks. The bookkeeper's virtual machine has grown to over 20MB, and I'm starting to worry about how to keep that bugger backed-up!?!

I've been using ChronoSync to do a nightly backup, but that sort of backup routine just wasn't made for this situation... I'm thinking I should just do a weekly manual backup to a separate spot on the server.

What do you guys do? More specifically, what (if anything) can be done to pare down the size of that virtual machine?

Many TIA for any tips or advice you can give!
John

(in windows)
Control Panel -> VMWare Tools -> Shrink

might be able to take a few gigs off your file size.

Shrinking the VMWare will help but the real answer is to leverage shared folders as much as possible. Depending on where the applications you are using store their vital data you may be able to get almost all the critical, changing data shared over to Mac OS X's filesystem.

I back up my VMs as needed with simple Finder copies - but none of my critical data is on stored in the VM disk image format (gosh, it would be nice if we could mount those natively in OS X, like in the old VirtualPC days!)

Another alternative if you have a directory server (Mac OS X Server Open Directory, Windows 2000/2003 Server Active Directory) would be to enable roaming network-based profiles and/or folder redirection to move the local files on the VMs onto the network in some form.