“Vimalin is an extraordinary and absolutely ‘must-have’ utility for any computer user who is running VMware Fusion and/or Workstation.

Because Vimalin is an expertly designed and extremely powerful dedicated VMware virtual machine backup program that gives users many fantastic and time/resource-saving benefits, including all of the following:

  1. Extremely robust and highly reliable complete VM backups, which can be even more reliable than VMware’s native VM snapshots chains.
  2. Because using Vimalin enables users to stop using snapshots altogether, the user’s VM thereby becomes dramatically smaller (ours went from about 650 GB to just 150 GB, that is, less than one-quarter or 20% of their original size!).
  3. Backing up VM’s to an external hard drive (whereas snapshots are stored locally), thereby saving the user hundreds of valuable gigabytes on his/her internal boot drive.
  4. Fusion users of Vimalin now can exclude their VM directory (~Documents/Virtual Machines) from their Time Machine backups, thereby making them both (1) vastly smaller and also (2) much faster.
  5. Because Vimalin users no longer need to use snapshots, they never will discover that their VM contains hundreds of gigabytes of “orphan” snapshots (i.e., snapshots that the user deleted, but that, for some reason, still exist in the VM), as we had on all of our Macs.

So, in light of the above, backing up our VMware VM’s went from a massive headache (i.e., huge files with tons of snapshots and Time Machine issues) before Vimalin, to an extremely efficient and “lean and mean” process with Vimalin, that now takes vastly less time and much less effort.

Finally, the founder of Vimalin and its publisher, Antwise Solutions, Wil van Antwerpen, is both extraordinarily knowledgeable about VMware VM’s (he could write a textbook on them!) and also is exceptionally helpful, always providing us with very valuable information and insights, and very promptly responding to any questions that we have.

Accordingly, and as a decades-long computer and VMware user, I and my company cannot recommend Vimalin highly enough. Indeed, Vimalin is an absolute godsend, because it has saved us terabytes of storage, countless hours of work, and also hundreds of dollars (because we now do not need to buy larger internal boot and external backup drives), thereby paying for itself many times over, and is an absolute must-have utility for every VMware user!

– Evan Katz,

Managing Director, Crawford Ventures, Inc., New York.
Hedge fund expert and former Contributing Editor of Personal Computing magazine”