Over the last month or two, I’ve been working with Xojo primarily in a virtual environment. I’ve been writing an iOS app which requires the latest Xcode which requires Catalina. I’m reticent to upgrade my laptop to Catalina because of all the issues I’ve heard about it, etc. It was suggested in the forums to run Catalina in a virtual machine and develop there.
I purchased a 2TB SanDisk flash drive for running my VMs. And I want to say, I REALLY like operating this way. It allows me to develop for newer OS than I may have and it also keep things simple in that environment. I really like it. And since iCloud syncs my files, I don’t have to worry about backing up anything from the development “machine.” I would highly recommend this to anyone who doesn’t necessarily want to update to the latest OS version. And on the external flash drive, it’s pretty fast. Only marginally slower than on the actual machine.
I wouldn’t consider iCloud to be a backup at all. Backing up large VMs to the cloud isn’t a good idea either. You need at least another hard disk in case anything goes wrong. Doing backups is hard. Cloud backups are so much harder. I have had Crashplan fail, Arq multiple times and recently Acronis on BS.
Oh that’s not what I meant so my mistake if I wasn’t clear. My project files are saved to iCloud. So I can access them on any machine.
Backups of VMs is indeed hard. I screwed up my first Catalina VM and wrecked it by letting the Mac going into deep sleep when the battery went out. I still had the VM running on the external drive. But it was Ok - other than the time to reinstall - none of my work was lost as it was all saved to the cloud. I now take regular snapshots of the VM as well.
And getting a VM down from a cloud backup is a pain. I have one up in iDrive that is 100G and iDrive hangs on the download after about 26G.
I have had this happen to me in Windows as well. The recovery was painless as the VMs could be restarted without any issue. This happened both in HyperV and Virtual Box on a windows 10 host no problems. Now if I could just disable all the junk I dont want windows doing for me.
I’ve been doing this in parallels for years. I too had to do the same thing with Catalina for my IOS builds. We still have to support an application built in another language that won’t yet run on Catalina so I cannot upgrade to it for my primary OS. I also use it for our Windows development. I have a large enough SSD drive in my Macbook Pro to run all my primary VM’s off the internal drive. But I do keep backups on external drives.
