Hello, I'm having trouble with a Win11 VM (I run Parallels 17 on Macbook Pro 2013 with iOS 11.17.1 Big Sur) which at times causes my mac to run out of space, resulting in a crash when I try to reclaim space. I've been over dozens of solutions to delete snapshots (which I have none) and cleaning both my Macbook and the VM, turning off automatic backup in Time Machine so as to make sure there's no issue there. What I've come up with so far is that when I delete the VM, which currently is ~130 GB in size, to back it up from an external drive via TM, more than twice that size is freed up (~360 GB the last time) as the size of 'other files' decreases too. When I restore the VM file via TM, 'other files' increases in size again until things are almost back to where they were, but with some 30 GB or so more free space (which then disappears again over the next few days/weeks). Any ideas what to do about this? I only use the VM to play some games, so I could well reinstall it, but as this problem seems to persist, I'm guessing it won't go away that easily.
I tend to use on a regular basis Windows Tools -> Disk Cleanup -> Clean up system files. On update, Windows tends to retain previous systems so that you can go back there if something goes wrong but, as I have a backup of the VM, I find that removing them gives quite a lot of space. On Windows shut down, I then use the Reclaim button. This does not remove all Temporary files. I find it worth opening Windows Tools -> Run then entering %temp% to see what is there. On Intel I find I can select all and click the bin to remove. With M1 Arm, some refuse to be deleted as they are in use by the system. Apologies for not helping if you already do these things.
Have you disabled the Sleep / Hibernate modes/files in Windows? They shouldn't be more than the virtual RAM you've set (per file), but it saves some space. Beyond that, why is your VM so big in general? Give or take apps / games, the OS itself shouldn't be much over 16 - 25 Gb (sans temp / system files). It may benefit you to put the basic install on the Mac's drive and use an external SSD to install the Windows Apps to. You'd have to create a second virtual storage device, tell Parallels where it is, and remember to connect that drive Before you load the VM. You're bound to take some level of performance hit, but it's either that or you look closer at your Mac's user files to see if maybe Those could be housed externally instead. That Other file is basically one big MacOS temp folder, so if you're not restarting your Mac periodically, then it can get pretty big. It's heavily affected by Host OS updates as well as I've noticed Apple devices have a nasty habit of not purging it when it gets low on storage.
@JohnW70 and @Aries@PF Thank you both for your replies and suggestions - I'm very grateful and will use several of them as soonas I can! Let me just clarify - my problem isn't the size of the Win11 VM (I have 100 GB of games on it, so although I could probably shave off a few tens of GBs, that's the lesser problem), it's that the last time I restored a copy of the .pvm file (178 GB - I've decreased it's file size since then) to my MacBook, the 'Other files' increased by c. 180 GB, so that having the VM on the computer occupies a total of 360 GB on the Mac as opposed to the expected 178 GB of the .pvm file. I'm looking for an explanation and if possible a fix to this problem - as I mentioned, I could well do a reinstall of Windows on a new VM, but as I did that only a few months ago, it seems unlikely to prevent the problem from occurring again. @JohnW70 Thanks for the suggestions - I've used them now, without any luck, unfortunately. Do I understand it correctly that you're referring to Windows Tools inside the Windows VM, not any kind of tool that is accessed from MacOS? @Aries@PF Good point about temp files - I restart the computer several times a week, so that should be covered: I've located 76 GB of temp files in the ~/Library/Caches folder (which several cleaning programs refuse to do anything about) so although that could explain some of the over 200 GB in the 'Other files' section, it's far from all of it. Any idea of other places I could look for the mysterious growth of temp files connected to the VM?
Yeah, the Other category is the most annoying and unfortunately, not just a single thing. It's a mix of cache/temp files for pretty much everything including the OS, cloud backups, music/photo sync, and a number of other things. The first thing I'll say to this is don't use those apps that do stuff automatically because most of them aren't in the app store and thus not vetted by Apple for safety. Definitely don't touch MacKeeper as I don't care what they claim, it's permanently filed as malware in my mind (and the general Mac community). I found a link with some good info, but again, they're trying to get you to download their app, so ignore those links. Basically, it'll do you some good to not have the Mac store things like your messages, photos, etc locally as those are likely eating up storage. Hopefully, you're also not having Time Machine backup to the same drive either as that's kinda pointless.
In answer to your last question, yes, I was referring to Windows Tools inside the Windows VM. Having said that, you only recover the space when you select "Reclaim" in Parallels -> Windows Configuration -> General, unless you have selected "Reclaim disk space on shutdown". Does this show "Reclaimable 0KB"?
