Automating daily cold backup of a virtual machine
TweetPosted on Saturday Jan 31, 2015 at 01:24PM in Technology
I have a virtual machine which is running on VMware Fusion 6, and runs some batch jobs for every weekday. I wrote a backup script for it. it does some annoying work such as mounting, un-mounting and stopping or restarting the vm then simply copies .vmware directory into mounted directory. also purging function is available. see my GitHub repository for detail.
First, I wrote the script with tmutil which manipulates Time Machine via CLI, but it excludes virtual machines while exclusion list is empty so I stopped use it. so the script simply copies with copy task of Ant instead.
As to snapshot - I exclude it from the options because it’s not recommended for production use by VMware (VMware does not recommend running production virtual machines off snapshots on a permanent basis). additionally, they said that AutoProtect should only be used in testing environments. see http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1014509
