Vimalin

Vimalin is a standalone backup software tool for virtual machines that are running in the VMWare Workstation Pro. Its purpose is to provide convenience: you just have to set it up once and schedule the backup jobs and the you can just forget about it. Moreover, you can continue using your virtual machine without worrying about the backup’s integrity, which is one of its utmost features.

To be able to deploy Vimalin successfully on your computer, you first have to make sure a compatible version of VMWare Workstation Pro is installed on your system. Vimalin is also installed as a Windows service to allow automatic backups on the local PC.

Once you run Vimalin, you are greeted by a window where you can see all the active backups, which are named exactly as the virtual machines. Here, you can also view the status of the latest backup, as well as the date and the time of the next scheduled job.

Vimalin can schedule multiple backup jobs for each of your VMWare virtual machines. It comes with predefined weekly, monthly and yearly backups but it also enables you to freely define new schedules whenever you find it convenient.

As the backup jobs are executed, the number of copies of a virtual machine is growing. Having that in mind, Vimalin enables you to configure a number of copies that will be kept. The older backups are then automatically deleted as new ones are created.

The backups can be saved on a local drive or a network folder. Please be advised that it is not recommended to create backups on the Windows drive, which is usually C, in order to avoid accidental data loss.

Vimalin features automatic email notifications, which means you can easily get alerts if a backup job fails or is completed with errors. Evidently, you can also configure it to send you email messages when the backup is successful.

Some might argue that VMWare comes with an integrated Time Machine feature to help you create snapshots of the virtual machine and that is perfectly true. However, backups with Time Machine require the virtual machines to be shut down in order to avoid corrupting the backup file, which is not necessary with Vimalin.

An alternative to the Time Machine is to create your own manual backups. Of course this is a solution but an application such as Vimalin offers the convenience of configuring the backup schedule once and then forget about it.