The only thing is that with rollback, it does an ‘on boot’ menu- if a virus makes it impossible to boot, I can do a rollback to a time before the virus hit=- I’m sure there’s a way with doing this htrough running Linux if windows won’t not, I guess- but then we’re talking complicated stuff I’m not familiar with- but I suppose if worst came to worst- I could always just [plop a new hard-drive in after I get it formatted, and do like you said- drag and drop the VM backup onto it-
[[By keeping your OS filesystem small, and your data stored on a different drive, it is quick and easy to recover from a disaster.]]
That’s what I’d like to do- but I don’t know much about partitions and maintaining them- etc-
[[The bulk of my personal data resides on a 2TB drive which is mounted to /home. That drive has been mirrored onto an external USB drive. If my /home drive dies, the USB drive can be mounted at /home to immediately resume operations until the dead drive can be replaced and restored.]]
That’s exactly what I’d like to do (and kinda what I do with the duplicated drive- I plop it in and get a new drive to replace my dead one, then duplicate to that one, and walla, up and running (but the duplication takes a long time- about 14 hours lol)- but your system seems like it owudl be much quicker- and no real down time (ie having to physically remove hard-drive, install old back up one etc)
[[Those image files can then be drag/dropped right back onto a host as needed. I’m not sure about VirtualBox, but I strongly suspect it has snapshot capabilities similar to VMWare — for quick incremental backups.]]
That’s what rollback does- snapshots- it’s set up to do automatic ones at start up- or anytime I tell it to- and does so automatically- (which has saved my bacon many times as I’m terrible about doing manual things like manual backups) but it sounds like your system is the way to go Because I do Not want windows 10 and certainly don’t want it being the one connected to internet at all times now that they are including massive spyware and forced updates- just not happy with the way windows has decided to go- and like someone said they may try going to a cloud based system pay per month eventually- Uggh!
The only thing though is whether I can move files between the windows VM and the host os Linux? Looks like that might be a problem?
Then, on the VM side of things, you have a large .vmdk file for each VM you have created. These can be drag/dropped to restore the entire image if necessary (complete hard drive failure), but you also have the option of making and restoring snapshots of the VMs. The VMWare Snapshot Manager can be configured to 'AutoProtect' your VMs. This just means it will automatically make snapshots on a schedule defined by you.
If you attempt to boot one of your VMs and it fails, restore a snapshot. The snapshots are stored in smaller .vmdk files, just like the main VM. They too can be drag/dropped to/from external storage if you wish.
Since the name of the game here is 'virtualization', your Windows VM is also networked via a virtual network interface. This virtual network interface is extremely cool, for several reasons. First, the virtual net interface is under the control of the hypervisor, so your Windows OS simply cannot perform any network communications without your permission. Second, the virtual network you configure between the Linux host and the virtual machine is all handled in RAM - -and is extremely fast when compared to packets traversing a wire.
I have shared folders on both my Win7 VM, and on the Linux host. Either OS can mount the shares of the other, so it's seamless to move files between the two systems.
And now we get the the whole reason I posted on this thread in the first place... Since the Win7 VM is attached to the Linux host via a virtual network, the Win7 VM can communicate with nothing but the Linux host. It's like there is a dedicated network cable between the host and VM which carries only their mutual traffic. My Linux host and other VMs have full access to the Internet, but the Win7 VM is completely isolated on a tiny virtual network. If Microsoft want to 'upgrade' my Win7 to Win10, they're going to have to do it in person!
Finally, that shared folder on the Linux host is also available to other systems on my LAN. This provides the Win7 VM with the ability to share files with any other system on the LAN, despite the fact that it is not connected to the LAN itself.