I have a problem with my Windows 7 VM taking up too much space on my host Mac. In Windows, My C drive is 65GB and when looking in Disk Management it is fully extended. In Parallels options, it shows my Total size at 85.3 (83.2GB is labeled Hard Disks, 1.9GB snapshots, 271.2MB Misc, 0.0KB Reclaimable). I've noticed the Hard Disk Size reported in parallels varies. It has been as high as 98GB. Is this common to have so much lost space? Any idea how to reclaim at at least some of it? Notes: Host is running Mountain Lion and Parallels 8.
No, it's not common, I'm guessing there are GBs of log files lingering in there, if you navigate inside de .pvm package (show package contents), and then inside the .hdd package do you find any log files taking up space? Can you post a screenshot of that?
I didn't find any log files and I decided to call. A tech connected and looked around for a while. After a backup, he had me try the advanced step in this KB: http://kb.parallels.com/9165 It took a long time to run and it bogged my mac down so it was useless, but when it was done, I had most of my space back with an option to reclaim 6GB more which I did which brought me down to just about my usage number. Thank you for looking into it though.
Doesn't seem like a practical approach if you have to delete all of your snapshots; incident #1563780 was created back in January but Parallels Support has so far not been receptive of the opportunity to re-examine why disk files are taking up way more space than they were with Parallels Desktop 3.
