backing up quicken for windows w/ time machine?

Welcome to Apple DIscussions!

Can I back it up to my new mac formatted drive?

If I understand correctly, Parallels treats everything on the Windows side as a single Mac compatible file. If that is the case, then Time Machine should be able to back up that file.

If a hard drive is not formatted for the Mac, Time Machine likely won't be able to back it up. But Mac formatted files should work just fine.

You can assign any external hard drive as a Time Machine destination drive as long as it is Mac formatted.

Message was edited by: a brody

Clcawc,
I see no problem in that, so long as the Windows virtual machine is able to still read the file after restoring it from the Mac disc.

Hmmmm 😉 If you were to use Quicken 2007 for the Mac and have a .Mac account you can configure Quicken 2007 to save/upload all your financial Quicken data base to the .Mac's iDisk when it terminates or whenever you choose automatically. In addition the data sent to the offsite iDisk will be compressed and encrypted before uploading which not only protects the sensitive data but will upload much quicker. I've been using this feature for several years and will not ever give it up for the security of having this important data kept and saved offsite.

Give this some thought as you're a new Mac user. 🙂 Good luck and enjoy. 🙂

"If I understand correctly, Parallels treats everything on the Windows side as a single Mac compatible file. If that is the case, then Time Machine should be able to back up that file."

If that is true you might want to think about how much disk space your TM will use. It backs up each file that has changed. I assume that the "parallels" file would change when you use it, so get backup EVERY time.

How big is this file???

Yes, I've seen some people report problems with Time Machine backing it up every time. The size is dependent on Parallels size of the file assignment. As I don't have Parallels, I'd ask this question of Parallels directly. Perhaps only occasionally backing up the Parallels file is possible. Or setting Time Machine to only backup when you want to preserve the files on it. You can always tell Time Machine not to back an individual file in the System Preferences, or folder, and then remove that preference when you want to change it. I.e. once a day before you go to sleep Time Machine can backup your Parallels file. By the time you wake up, it will be backed up.

I use Quicken for Windows in Parallels.

You can't normally have the Parallels folder in Documents as an included TM item unless you have a HUGE hard drive. My little XP installation under Parallels is a 3.9 GB .hdd file and it changes every time you use it (and it gets bigger unless you compress it frequently). TM will copy the entire file every hour and run out of room.

I use a Sandisk thumbdrive USB to copy the quicken backup folder (I use one called Quickback) file at the end of every session. If there is a fire you lose the mac and the TM backup. Not a great idea.

However nothing would stop a user to drag the "Quickback" folder after doing a Quicken backup to the mac desktop and then TM can copy that all the time. You only need the one folder - under 10 MB usually, as you can always reinstall Quicken.

That's a great suggestion. Thanks... 🙂