Duplicating and upgrading a virtual machine

[ChrisH9]

Hi there. I use Parallels with Windows specifically to run Turbo Tax personal and corporate software here in Toronto, Canada. I want to upgrade to Windows 10 but as my tax records go back quite a bit am concerned about 10's compatibility with older releases of Turbo Tax. I figured the best approach might be to duplicate the existing virtual machine and then upgrade the duplicate. Is this the best approach and if so, are there instructions somewhere as to how to do this? I'm currently running OSX Sierra and version 11 of Parallels. I'm fine with upgrading to v12 as well.

The current virtual machine is running Windows 7, BTW.

Thanks
Chris Hutcheson

 

[PaulChristopher@Parallels]

Hi @ChrisH9,
Yes, it is possible to duplicate the virtual machine and upgrade to Windows 10 virtual machine. Parallels virtual machine is available in the extension of (.pvm). Simply hit Spotlight icon (a magnifying glass on the right side of OS X menu bar) and type pvm copy(duplicate) it, and then upgrade to Windows 10 to check whether you are able to work with Turbo Tax application.

 

[rkulikov]

From my point the better option is to create virtual machine snapshot and try Windows 10. If something goes wrong - revert back to snapshot with pre-Windows 10 state. This is much faster and doesn't require lots of disk space for a full copy of VM.