My guest OS is Window 8 and I've been getting messages that I'm running out of disk space. I see from the general panel of Windows Configuration that the total size for Windows 8 is some 342GB of which some 329GB is taken up for snapshots with 13.5GB for hard disks. If I look at the hardware panel it shows that the hard disk capacity is set as 128GB. I did see that the 342GB did include some 7GB of reclaimable space and I reclaimed this (it was for old snapshots I later found), and I've since deleted some Windows apps that I don't really need. It did seem that the hard disk figure given matched the size of my C: drive in Windows. I have this guest OS stored in a Documents for Mac folder - I'm not sure why this isn't in my ordinary Documents folder but perhaps this is because I'm syncing the Documents folder with iCloud whereas I'm not doing this for the Documents for Mac one. If I examine the Documents for Mac folder and look at the package contents for the Windows 81.pvm file it shows that the Snapshots folder only takes up just over 4GB of space whereas the Windows 8.1-0.hdd file uses 336GB. This seems to conflict with the information shown in Windows Configuration. Is the bulk of the information about snapshots held in the .hdd file? I did read the FAQ file about increasing disk space and I tried to follow this through. It suggested merging the snapshots, of which I just have 6, using Terminal and I tried this. It did show a percentage figure which eventually went up to 100% but the usual prompt never reappeared so it still seemed to be running - I should have checked with the Activity Monitor! I gave up after a while and saw that the 6 snapshots were still there. I've found in the past that it takes a considerable time to just delete one snapshot so to merge all 6 must take forever! The instructions then went on to suggest increasing the limit for the hard disk capacity in the hardware panel but as this seems only to relate to the size of my C: drive I don't follow how this is going to help. There must be something I'm not following! Incidentally I'm using Time Machine to back up my Windows guest OS and I have plenty of free space on my 2TB hard drive.
Hi, to optimize the size of an existing virtual machine follow these instructions: 1) Ensure you have a backup of Windows. (Critical) 2) Delete Snapshots, refer to https://kb.parallels.com/5691 3) Once deleted, try to reclaim hard disk space. Refer to https://kb.parallels.com/114654 4) Check the size of Windows once these processes complete. NOTE: Do Not proceed without a backup and do not interrupt the process once initiated.
Thanks for your reply. The KB articles you refer to are different from the ones I saw before (I referred incorrectly to these as FAQ's) - incidentally your links didn't include the full KB numbers. I assume I'll have to delete all of my 6 snapshots individually, which is going to takes some time - I presume there's no quick way of deleting them all? The second KB article makes no mention of the figure that's currently shown for the hard disk capacity, which I assumed would be the maximum size allowed for the hard disk. Do I not need to change this figure?
Hi, you can remove snapshot one-by one or merge it And also if you do not need to change the disk size it's not necessary to change it. Please let me know if it's not that case.
