Searching old Fusion VM for a saved file

[meterman70]

So, I was once a fairly active Fusion user (buying the annual upgrade licenses etc.), running Windows 7 as a guest OS from within macOS.

Then came the switch to M1 silicon and the announcement that there would be no further support for x86 architecture.

I moved on and replaced the VM with a small PC that I could access via RDP.

I recently had the occasion to go spelunking into my Time Machine backups and stumbled across an older copy of that VM within an older system backup.

I would like to peek into that VM in hopes of finding a long-lost file.

What are my options?

[Technogeezer]

You can build a new Windows 11 ARM VM under Fusion on your Apple Silicon Mac. Restore the the old Windows 7 VM to your new Mac's disk and add its virtual disk to the Windows 11 ARM VM as a second hard drive. You can then access the files in that old VM. 

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Paul Rockwell (technogeezer)
vExpert 2026 (3x)
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[Technogeezer]

If you don't have a Apple Silicon Mac, you can restore the virtual machine to the Mac that you have and transfer the whole bundle (it's actually a folder) to the PC. You should then be able to install VMware Workstation on that PC and start the VM.  The virtual machine formats are the same between Fusion and Workstation, and the CPU architectures (Intel) match between the VM and your Intel PC. 

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Paul Rockwell (technogeezer)
vExpert 2026 (3x)
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[meterman70]

I still have the M1 Mac, but between copying the VM out of the backups and trying to build a new Win11 ARM installation, all my free space vanished into the ether and the install failed. I do have that PC but VMWare won't install as that is also a Win7 installation (I don't use Windows enough anymore at home to justify moving to Win10 / 11 but looks like I must consider doing so. All this for one file? Gee).