Parallels not releasing Storage when VMs are deleted

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Paul Immanuel

Bit poster
I am running Parallels 16.2 on my MacBookPro, on Big Sur. I use parallels mainly to "play with Linux distributions". I test them out, and then delete the VMs. In the last week, I deleted three VMs that were rather large (between 50GB and 64GB each) and then I noticed that the available space in my mac did not increase. It shows that I have 200 GB free out of a 2 TB drive. Then I used carbon copy cloner to clone the drive. It successfully made a bootable clone, and it shows 412 GB free of a 2TB drive. This is what I expected of my Macbook. i used "find my file" to look for the VMs that I deleted and they are not there. And yes, I did empty the trash. Any idea why these files are invisible but still occupying space? BTW, the available space that is reported is consistent between Disk Utility, Finder, and terminal commands. Any ideas? Thanks Paul
 
Can't say for sure, but I think that's more related to the way the journaling works on AFPS, and quite possibly how the /private file structure works. I've seen similar issues with storage estimates on Catalina outside of Parallels.
 
Thank you Mark. I will wait. If it is not a Parallels issue, then I should take this discussion to a forum that is focused on File system issues. But I will wait for a few days... Thanks, Paul
 
Just want to add that it's worse if you use Time Machine. macOS retains the most recent backup in a series of local snapshots, which eat disk space until it ultimately gets purged like a FIFO. If one of those snapshots has the VM on it, it might take a while before it gets purged. Note that Disk Utility doesn't always show local snapshots as 'purgeable space', either.

For example, I updated Xcode, which is a 3-6GB update file as well as 17-18GB on disk. I performed the update on Dec 24th (or thereabouts). I just regained about 30GB of free space today, which likely included about 11GB that I trimmed from a Win10 VM yesterday.

So, if you do a lot of VM creation/deletion for testing purposes, you might want to try to exclude the VMs (or the folder that contains your VMs) from Time Machine.

I think there's a section in OnyX (if you're familiar with that) which allows you to delete local Time Machine snapshots. Not really sure how good a thing that is to do, but it's yet another option if you're concerned about disk space.
 
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