Reducing the size of my Windows 11 PRO VM file???

Discussion in 'Parallels Desktop on a Mac with Apple silicon' started by SWANDY, Jan 16, 2023.

  1. SWANDY

    SWANDY Pro

    Messages:
    359
    As the title says, when I created my Windows 11 VM (on my M1 iMac) I made it too large for my eventual use. I have about 150 GB of "free space" on my Local Drive C. Is there anyway - without completely rebuilding the VM and starting from scratch - to get back some of this space? The option in Parallels to "reclaim disk space" only reclaimed 1.8 GB. Never considered doing this before so not sure if there is a thread on this. Couldnt find anything in the Parallels Knowledge Base articles when I searched.
    Thanks.
     
  2. AzinS

    AzinS Member

    Messages:
    34
    yes you can do it. Shut down the VM, then in hardware section > hard disk > advanced > properties > and here you can decrease the hard drive size. (you need to delete snapshots to be able to change the hard disk size)
    Since you can not have a snapshot/backup for resizing, then you could lose data. So you can "clone" the VM and test this workflow on the clone first.
    how to clone a vm: in Control Center > right click on gear > clone
     
  3. SeanB12

    SeanB12 Bit poster

    Messages:
    2
    I had a similar issue. My Mac was all of a sudden running out of disk space. It was because within the windows settings of the parallels VM, a Windows update or some other cause changed the storage disk space size to 256 gb. I selected change disk space to 128 gb and it fixed the issue after a restart of the Mac
     

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