On the other hand backing up a VM is simply a matter of keeping a copy of it somewhere. Personally I have never worried much about vulnerability of my virtual machines for that reason. If one becomes compromised (though none ever has yet) I will simply delete it and use the copy.Paul On 31/01/2014 20:49, J R FOX wrote:Whatever your VM solution of choice happens to be, so long as you are using W2K -- or very soon to be, XP -- as your "Guest" Windows, there ought to be some way of denying internet access to the Guest OS, while hopefully placing no such blackout onto the Host OS that is running the VM. *That* is the security / AV consideration. Absent this, I would only want to be running the VM with my ethernet cable unplugged, or wifi turned Off. Inconvenient, but doable.