I am a noob with Mac - helping a friend with his parallels / win 10 not starting

First, I am good with Windows and don't use macs.
A friend has parallels desktop 14 running on a macbook pro. He has windows 10 on it. It doesn't boot up - gets to a 21a error message. He uses the windows VM for just quicken. Looking in this forum, I saw people talking about doing snapshot then reset from within parallels. The snapshot took a second. Reset is greyed out.
I wound up calling support. VERY IMPRESSED! I wish windows products had such good support.
The tech tried some things but wasn't able to get things working. But DID realize / point out to me that the windows 10 file / VM was on his icloud drive!? So it's NOT stored locally!? And I was looking for the quicken files. I could boot to windows command line and didn't find the data files, but did see quicken was installed.
He suggested downloading the VM from icloud and the put in shared\parallels. It's a 20GB file so download will take a while then I'll do that.
But does that sound right!?
1) the4 VM is ONLY in icloud? (there's a 'shortcut' to the win 8 hard drive (it was upgraded from win 8 to win 10) on the desktop.... that points to the icloud drive) and not stored locally also? Seems performance would be pitiful - slower than a spinning hard drive for sure.
2) The quicken data files are only in icloud drive? not local? And from inside windows, he'd have had to download the icloud app and stored files there? Again, performance would be crap? I know quicken locally is slow.

Thanks!

 

I doubt anyone can answer your questions because we don't have access to the relevant computer or iCloud account. However, it would certainly be sensible to download the VM and store it on the local drive. Make sure you start the local version after that by clicking on the local .pvm file.

 

Sorry, I'm just looking for general info
1) icloud - I did see a setting (that was checked on his computer) that talked about moving things to icloud vs. keep them on the comptuer also, so yeah, it's feasible (likely?) that the VM's GBs of the file were all on the web!?
2) For windows quicken data to be only on icloud, he would have had to install icloud for windows on the VM, THEN set it up to move the data to icloud / not leave a copy on the PC? (is that the default? to sweep anything on the desktop / docs to icloud ONLY?).

And yeah, with all that - the VM and the quicken data - in the cloud (ONLY), I would have thought the performance would be abysmal.? But he didn't have any complains? (and low expectations?).

Just looking for your thoughts all all this. would it make sense to run a vm from icloud?