New to parallels - please be gentle - I do think it's fantastic by the way. I can see from searching previous posts that this is a common observation - but many responses are dated so I thought it worth asking the question for an up to date answer in light of current software functionality. I put parallels on my MBA just to run Microsoft Money. As its the only program I need under Windows, I went for Windows XP to (hopefully) minimise resources consumed (disk space, memory etc), and Money runs 100% ok under XP. I installed Parallels and Money and hey ho, all was fantastic. Brilliant performance and consumption of resources hardly noticeable. But the VM is now growing in size. It started at 6Gb, went to 8, went to 12, went to 14, now its at 16GB. All in three weeks. I let it be and thought it would settle down, but its just growing and growing. Something's wrong! I'm just running this one application. I checked a couple of things like turning off system restore, and setting the optimisation settings to work in concert with Time Machine. No difference, the VM is just growing and eating up my precious solid state for no good reason that I can see. Any suggestions please?
Yes I tried that one ... "Parallels Desktop could not find any data to compress or remove to free up the space used by this virtual machine"
Not sure which measure I should be looking for, but assuming it's the C Drive, then it's showing as 3.68GB used and 60.3GB Free
Defragment the disk in Windows, then do the reclaim space again, another possible problem would be ever growing logs inside the .pvm package, if the defragment plus reclaim doesn't work, select the .pvm, click with the right mouse button, select show package contents, take a screenshot of it and post it here (don't delete or change anything inside the .pvm).
The defrag and reclaim made no difference I'm afraid. In fact it's now taken another leap from 16GB to 19GB. Here's the screenshot
Can you do the show contents thing for the .hdd file and take a screenie again? Also, do you have snapshots turned on?
Interesting ... I'm guessing that these are the snapshots, and that's where the space is going? My expectation was that the first snapshot would be sizeable, with just small increments for each snapshot, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
Yes, those are the snapshots, snapshots are incremental (only what's changed is saved), but they operate at a disk level, not a file level. This explains why defragmenting your disk made the VM increase about 3 GB, because data was moved around. If you want to save space and don't intend on going back to the previous state on any of those snapshots, you should merge them. I should say that I personally do not like/trust snapshots, specially when they get chained (not just one snapshot, but one after another and another).
Well just a final note to say a big thanks for your help and insight. Now I can see what's happening and just how big (or small!) the VM actually is, I can decide on a suitable backup strategy. Cheers.
