Feature Suggestions for Beta 1

[shazoom]

Backup Target

Only accepting volumes for backup targets seems unnecessary cognitive overhead for the user to me and directories should be acceptable targets too.

Backing up to an external device is more secure but sometimes unnecessary when one has SuperDuper/Carbon Copy and Time Machine backups of the host. An external drive will be useful to save some space and to provide physical separation but the critical problem of making sure the VM has an intact backup should be achievable with minimal fuss.

[wila]

Hello Shazoom,

Thanks for the feedback, I have added it to the feature request list.

You are correct that using an external device is more secure, that was indeed one of the reasons to not allow you to backup to your local disk. When initially working on the backup target selection screen this was actually considered and an early version even allowed to select the home folder as a backup target. So why isn't that in the beta you might wonder?
There is another reason for that.

Almost everybody will run their VMs from within their home folder as it is a default location.
So that means that users would be backing up to the same disk as they are running virtual machines from.
Besides the loss in performance that is OK except for one specific case.
Running out of disk space.

Imagine that Vimalin is backing up your running VMs to your home folder and then runs out of disk space.
In that scenario the backup will not succeed, which is expected.
There also a very real danger however that it has wrecked any VMs running from that same disk as VMware Fusion is not always able to save your VM when you run out of disk space rapidly.
Having a backup program being the cause of damaging a virtual machine is a big No no in my agenda.

So while I agree it can be nice to have the ability to run the backup locally, this feature can only be added once all checks on this are in place and very well tested. It may sound like a simple test, but it is a bit harder as it looks like.
So for the moment this has to be on the list of feature requests until there is time to implement it properly and safely.

[shazoom]

Hi Wila,

thanks for the reply; it makes sense now you've explained why.

I rarely backup to external drives directly (via Carbon Copy I do) but I have quite a big SSD, but most Apple laptops don't so I guess that backing-up to an external volume may be more natural for many.