Mac host file system corruption during shrinking of PD13 Win10 VM

[RHS]

I must have put it out into the universe. I was JUST thinking about shrinking my backup copy that's sitting on an external disk. Sadly it's not SSD but, I guess I could try running it overnight.

 

[DavidA4]

stay far far far far away from reclaiming disk space... unless you have a good backup and a lot of time and steal nerves!

Yeah, it happened to me a while back - catastrophic failure. NEVER use the reclaim disk feature - this will destroy your machine.

 

[RHS]

A bit of encouraging news: I was able to shrink my backup copy on the external HD without any issues. It took a while but it actually finished. I now see that I will either have to invest in a Thunderbolt SSD external drive and house the VM there for good or, spend several hours backing up VM's and reclaiming disk space. I have not yet tested the shrunken VM. I ran out of time. I will test after the holidays.

 

[RHS]

To whom it may concern...I invested in an external Thunderbolt SSD to house the Windows VM. WOW the data transfer is so fast. It runs the Windows 10 VM just like it was on the Mac SSD. I can even reclaim disk space like the old days and it's much faster doing that as well. The only thing I have to be concerned with is that I cannot reboot the Mac while the Windows VM is running on that external disk. I'll have to be careful to remember that!