My Parallels VM file is huge, can I move it to an external SSD ?

I only use ONE Windows program, Quicken 2015 which is only 165MB, but my VM uses up so much space : 81.86 GB !! I've deleted every app I could find that Windows would let me delete, but it's still using so much memory.

Can I move my VM to an external SSD drive and then just plug it in when I need to use Quicken so i can free up and use those 82GB?

What exact steps do I need to do so Parallels looks for the VM in the SSD drive and not in my laptop drive?

VERY IMPORTANT: I can't mess up this VM and I can't make a new VM because my program Quicken 2015 can NOT be reinstalled ever again. It will continue to work forever but it just can't be reinstalled.

 

You can definitely move the VM to an external SSD. Just make sure the VM is fully shut down, close Parallels, then drag the entire .pvm file onto your SSD. After that, simply double-click it from the SSD and Parallels will run it there, so you can delete the old copy from your laptop.

 

You can run for external SSD - I just got USB4-Thunderbolt enclosure and that speed tests to 2800MB/sec Read/Write and that is fast, really fast. Running VM from this setup will be same as internal drive. 4TB cost less than $300 for SSD and enclosure.
If this copy of VM is that important, you want to make backup (zip the thing together). Huge and will take time, but you can always restore if something bad happens. Or, you can make backup of the whole disk, which contains this... And AFTER you made a backup try using clean disk tool in Windows and let it remove system files. You are likely having old upgrade and update files in your installation and these are not removed by Windows. You can google or AI "how to reduce size of Windows" and it will walk you through this. Note, that I run this routinely to keep VM smallish so it works. But, nothing is ever guaranteed so make backup first.