# (1 of 3): Bil Castine

2 days, 9 hours after this post was published. (Wed 16 Apr 2008, 11:24 PM CST)

i regularly copy 15GB Parallels VM disks between several locations. i copy them to/from a windows server, though the standard SFM piece of Crap MS calls "Mac Compatible" is only compatible with OS 9's AFP which is limited to <2GB files and 32 character filenames, so i use the most excellent (and frightfully expensive) ExtremeZ-IP to provide modern AFP services. you could also format your external drive (USB, FIreWire, Keychain, etc...) as HFS+ which would allow >2GB files. lastly, you could use DropStuff to split the compressed image into segments <2GB to allow them to be stored on FAT32 formatted media.

hope this helps.

# (2 of 3): Peter Kazanjy » vmware.com/mac

3 days, 3 hours after this post was published. (Thu 17 Apr 2008, 6:00 PM CST)

Matt:

Here's a way to take your current "monolithic" disk, and make it into a split disk. Hope this helps!

~Pete VMware Fusion Product Marketing

NOTE: Make sure to power off/shut down the VM before doing the below things.

1) Download vdiskmanager GUI from the VMware Fusion user forums, vmware.com/go/fusionforums

2) Click on the Convert tab

3) Click on the Input button, select the source monolithic disk

4) Check the "Split disk into 2 GB files"

5) Click on the Output button

6) Save the virtual disk as the same name as the source monolithic disk, but save in a different folder

7) Once converted, move the monolithic disk to a new folder

8) Move all the contents of the split disk to the original VM bundle

9) Power on the VM

10) Assuming the VM powers on and boots correctly, you can now throw away the original monolithic disk

# (3 of 3): Mark Wheadon » markwheadon.com

1 year, 2 months after this post was published. (Tue 30 Jun 2009, 8:36 AM CST)

You can improve matters by storing your VM(s) in a sparse-bundle filesystem:

http://www.markwheadon.com/blog/2009/06/backing-up-virtual-machine-using-sparse-bundle/

That way, the data is split over much smaller files and so the incremental backups are smaller.

Cheers,

Mark