How to clean up Windows after importing Boot Camp to Parallels Virtual Machine

I have had Parallels Desktop for Mac for quite some time. I've upgraded a number of times. When I first got Parallels, it was to run my Boot Camp partition through Parallels. Then I decided I didn't want to commit the disk space to the separate partition so I imported to a Parallels Virtual Machine and deleted the Boot Camp partition. I have since upgraded Parallels a few times, Window (from 7 to 10), and I've upgraded Mac OS X a few times. I want to upgrade Mac OS again to the latest, and I am running out of disk space, so I'm looking at ways to eliminate clutter on the drive. I wonder if in the import from Boot Camp to Parallels if there were any files that may have been carried forward from the Boot Camp setup that are either redundant or not needed in the Virtual Machine version of Windows 10. I run very few programs in Window (Schwab Edge charting software, and Quickbooks) and the Parallels seems very large at approx 330 MB. Can someone help me understand it this is a "normal" size, and if not what I might look to delete to make the filesize a little smaller.

Thanks,

 

Hello,
You said that Parallels size is 330mb, is it VM size or Parallels Desktop app size? Please provide us with a bit more details about Parallels Desktop size?

 

Parallels VM -- file name "Windows 10.pvm" is 330.22 GB. App "Parallels Desktop.app" is 395.5 MB. I apologize for my poor proofreading in the original post.

 

Thank you for your reply.
Please check this KB article for more info about the disk space free up

 

Thanks for your help. The KB article you suggested pointed me in the right direction. The content of the article itself didn't really help much, but I noticed that I had about 10 snapshots dating back as far as 2016. I deleted all but the most recent 2 from this month, and I recovered more than 200 GB of space. I notice that I have a "Take a snapshot every" set to auto, and number to retain set to auto.

So how many snapshots should I expect to be kept, and how big should they be? Currently, with 2 snapshots, my VM is now down to 136 GB from the previous 330 GB.

 

You can keep snapshot with necessary changes you did. Or maybe take snapshot before an update..
Numbers of snapshot depends on your needs.