Free up hard space by using Windows from external drive

I use windows only for an accounting program which is not available for mac. Parallels and Windows take a good bit of room on my internal hard drive. I have seen threads suggesting you can run Windows from an external hard drive, all that is necessary is to copy the .pvm file to the external hard drive. My question is: does this free up the space on my internal hard drive which is currently used by Parallels and Windows. In other words, does transferring the .pvm file cause all of the related windows and parallels files to be copied to the external hard drive?
I apologize if this question has already been answered. I did search the forums, and could not find an answer to the question.
Thank you.

 

Hi DavidL19,

Yes, you can move your Windows VM to an external drive and run from it, but you cannot move Parallels Desktop as it is an application installed in Applications folder on your internal hard drive. Please refer this article to move your VM to a external drive and run from it.

Thanks,
Ajith M.

 

Thanks for the prompt reply. I will give it a try, and hopefully it will free up a signficant amount of space on my internal hard drive.

 

Hi DavidL19,

Feel free to reach out anytime for support.

Thanks,
Ajith M.