It might be useless to you, and frankly I don't care!, however if it helps stops others that read this from recklessly backing up a Virtual Machine by using either Time Machine or making partial backups of a virtual hard disk and not treating it as a whole then I'm satisfied with what I wrote! Image may be NSFW.
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BTW I'm familiar with rysync and do not need to read the manual pages and I'm not saying that partial backup cannot be made or not work when done properly however for the average Mac User it should probably be avoided and always treat the Virtual Machine Package as a whole while more importantly maintaining regular ongoing proper backups of the User Data stored with the Virtual Machine, if not stored directly outside the Guest's Filesystem and backed up from there.
The fact is, if VMware Fusion 5.0.3 is now touching all .vmdk files even though if only the last snapshot disk was all that was modified and it has now broke your rsync backup regime... well that's life and you'll need to find a workaround until and if VMware changes it in a future release. Suggest you file a Defect Report if so inclined! Image may be NSFW.
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