[vbox-dev] Using xattrs to exclude disk images from time machine under OSX

[Louis King Jr]

My two cents. I use Time Mchine to backup my VMs and like it the way things
are.

On Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 12:20 PM, Klaus Espenlaub <
klaus.espenlaub at oracle.com> wrote:

> Hi Andrew,
>
> On 11.09.2015 05:00, Andrew Melo wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I am looking to implement enabling a setting for Virtualbox to
> > automatically set the
> > "com.apple.metadata:com_apple_backup_excludeItem" xattr for newly
> > created disk images, most probably hooked into the global/per-VM
> > extradata somewhere under the VboxInternal tree. This xattr will cause
> > time machine to ignore the file when backing up, without having to
> > manually add the directories where Virtualbox is storing the images.
>
> Sounds like a nice option to me, but not something which should happen
> unconditionally (as some people might wan to have their VMs handled by
> time machine).
>
> > Why don't I just add ~/Virtualbox\ VMs to the exclusion? Because
> > there's some applications which integrate kicking off a VM for
> > testing, and the images are stored next to the rest of the application
> > state.
>
> I don't follow why you think 'time machining' VM configs without the
> corresponding disk images makes any sense.
>
> > Looking through the source tree, the change looks to be
> > straightforward, but I don't want to take the time to make a patch if
> > this feature wouldn't be considered for inclusion.
>
> The real challenge from my perspective is to make this configurable in a
> sensible way. I'm almost certain that a significant number of users
> would complain if for all newly created disk images VirtualBox would
> automatically exclude them from the backup. Feel free to give arguments
> which support the opposite :)
>
> I do agree that the basic feature isn't complicated. The tricky part is
> finding a sensible way to configure this, as no other platform so far
> needed a similar configuration.
>
> Thanks for your proposal, we'll see what comes out of it...
>
> Klaus
> >
> > Thanks!
> > Andrew
> >
>
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