Some questions about Vimalin

[Sontec]

Hi Wil,
Today I was made aware of your program and I made a mental note for the future.
Because I don't have a test computer to test your program right now, I wanted to ask some "pre-use" questions...

1. I have a VM running on Workstation 15 (size: about 300GB.)
Do I have to have e.g. another 300GB as temporary space for the backup to take place?

2. When I use a networkpath as a target, will it be (temporarily) accessable by other programs on my computer?
(This to determine if my target would be vulnerable for ransomware while the backup is running)

3. I primary use Gmail/G-Suite for e-mail. Recently Google announced that legacy authentication
won't be supported in 2020.
Apps have to use "Sign in with Google" to get permission to use the Gmail account.
Are you planning to implement the new Google directive?
(P.s. just for sending e-mail I probably could use Outlook.com because it's less restrictive ;-) )

Best regards, Martijn.

[wila]

Hello Martijn,

Welcome.
Thanks for your questions. I will answer them one by one.

Hi Wil,
1. I have a VM running on Workstation 15 (size: about 300GB.)
Do I have to have e.g. another 300GB as temporary space for the backup to take place?

The backup is made directly to the external disk / network location, so for copying the files itself you do not need extra space.
However..
If your VM is running at the time of the backup, then Vimalin will make a VMware snapshot before it starts copying and commits that snapshot after it is done with the copy.
It depends on how you configured your virtual disk in the VM and how much RAM you assigned to the VM on how much free space you need for that to work.
If you have a split disk scheme then it needs (VM RAM+video RAM+virtual disk slice size+a few extra GB buffer) on snapshot commit time.
If you have a single file virtual disk then it needs (VM RAM+video RAM+virtual disk size+a few extra GB buffer) on snapshot commit time.

I normally recommend people to use the split disk scheme.
For a 300GB virtual disk, the disk slices can maximally become 9.4GB in size.

2. When I use a networkpath as a target, will it be (temporarily) accessable by other programs on my computer?
(This to determine if my target would be vulnerable for ransomware while the backup is running)

Note: for the moment my explanation of this question is only how it works on Vimalin for Windows, this mechanism is different for the macOS product.

Normally the VimalinWorker process that takes care of the actual copying for the backup runs under your own Windows account.
It will connect to the network share before the copy takes place - if not yet connected.
If Vimalin opened that connection then it will also ask windows to disconnect once it is done copying.

It is possible during installation to use an account with more privileges than your own account.
(Providing the user account is a required step in the setup program)
The account used should at least be able to communicate with VMware Workstation Professional via the vmrun mechanism.
Using another account than your normal Windows user account might be tricky to get to work, but it should work.

3. I primary use Gmail/G-Suite for e-mail. Recently Google announced that legacy authentication
won't be supported in 2020.
Apps have to use "Sign in with Google" to get permission to use the Gmail account.
Are you planning to implement the new Google directive?
(P.s. just for sending e-mail I probably could use Outlook.com because it's less restrictive ;-) )

This is on my list of things to implement for an upcoming update in Vimalin 2.x.
Had actually already done some research on how-to do this and it should not be a problem to implement.

Interestingly though, I just noticed that I had not yet opened a ticket for this, so thanks for the reminder!

--
Wil