Does loading a bootcamp partition in VMWare fusion affect Time Machine?

Question

Recently I upgraded the RAM on my MacBook Pro and did a fresh install of Windows 7 using BootCamp. I partitioned 200MB out of my 500MB drive to be for Windows 7. I then had VMWare Fusion setup the partition to be used from within it.

Since I've done this, I've noticed that Time Machine is running a lot more frequently. When I click in the taskbar to view it's status, it often says it is backing up approximately 5GB of information at a time, or processing about 2000 files at a time.

Sometimes I let the process finish, sometimes I tell it to stop because it starts to slow down the machine a little (since I'm doing heavy development work both on the Virtual and the Physical machine).

This leads me to believe that Time Machine is backing up my Virtual Machine in addition to my Physical Machine. Is this correct? Is there a way to prevent it? I plan on using Windows 7's own backup tool for the virtual machine.

Answer 1

After a little more digging, I found a KB article on the VMWare site that indicates that BootCamp partitions sometimes are added to the backup scheme in Time Machine.

This article indicates how to exclude the Virtual Machines from the backup, which is recommended by VMWare since they have their own best practice document for backing up virtual machines.

After updating the settings, the next time Time Machine ran it ignored my BootCamp partition entirely, avoiding the 4.3 GB backup every single hour. Sanity restored!