A few months ago I got an external USB drive. My plan was to use it to backup my laptop. It came with some software that came with it called Bounceback Express. The software was easy to use and it looked like it would do the job. Bounceback is not complicated. It mirrors my drive. At least I thought the process was simple.
The problem occurred when I needed to free up a lot of disk space on my laptop drive for a long video. My desktop is ancient and underpowered so the dual processor laptop is the best choice. I decided that I could delete the virtual machines I had been working on in VMware Server since I could restore them later using BounceBack. The Vista virtual machine was a real disk hog. I completed the video yesterday so today I decided to restore the virtual machines in between other tasks. Guess what? Neither machine will boot! Both the Vista and Suse 10.1 virtual machines complain that the virtual disk is not a virtual disk. They were when I shut them down so I can only think the backup did not work right. I tried a couple things but to no avail. Smaller virtual machines do not seem to have the problem. My work with Vista and Suse is toast! It is not a big loss since this work is experimental. So I re-installed Vista. I tried compressing the folder containing the Vista virtual machine but that took a real long time! I was curious whether the dual processor would help much. Obviously the dual processor did not help enough. So I tried my favorite free Microsoft utility, Synctoy. Synctoy took less time to copy the directory than the compress but I was more confident that the compress would work. I knew compression worked from all of the VMTN machines I have worked with in the past but I wasn’t sure about a plain Jane copy that Synctoy uses. It should have the same result as BounceBack Express. When I opened the virtual machine from the copied directory, it worked. I am curious what went wrong with Bounceback but I am already at my curiousity limit. I can realistically expect that I can copy the virtual machine folder back to the laptop drive and it will work. Boy, I sure did not expect to get shot in the foot with a backup program!