Huge difference on the guest disk size shortly after creating snapshots of Windows 10

J

JedrzejO

Member
Hello,
I am having the following problem: I am using TimeMachine with Parallels, this is one of the very useful features, that I am always having the guest OSes backed up and I don't need to worry. I am using SmartGuard with TimeMachine optimization. The problem is: if I have a snapshot created on the last run then during next execution of Windows 10 disk size will be hugely increased (like 10GB, see screenshot
cOt7JYN
) and this needs to be backed up afterwards. How can I check which files are changed regarding the last snapshot so that I am able to check what is going on? I am doing nothing fancy when running Windows, programming a bit where the build files are not larger than 80MB and every time the same files will be changed... After a couple of hours I have always 10GB more on disk. Something is very wrong here.

I disabled the system restore files settings.

Such a great files are not only difficult to backup but also unhealthy for SSD! I really don't understand this...
 
Last edited:
Right now I created new snapshot, done startup and shutdown after 3 seconds and I get 1GB of new data. What is happening here?

EDIT: I checked how it behaves on Linux and after startup the size does not increment (nice!). But running something as simple as "sudo apt update" (without upgrade!) increases the size of snapshot to 200 MB... The snapshots are very badly optimised I guess...
 
Last edited:
JedrzejO said:
Right now I created new snapshot, done startup and shutdown after 3 seconds and I get 1GB of new data. What is happening here?

EDIT: I checked how it behaves on Linux and after startup the size does not increment (nice!). But running something as simple as "sudo apt update" (without upgrade!) increases the size of snapshot to 200 MB... The snapshots are very badly optimised I guess...
Click to expand...
Snapshot does not work as an incremental backup. It will save the state of the hard disk similar to a clone when it is deleted or merged it will get merged with the default snapshot inside the virtual disk.
 
So when the SmartGuard is activated it will not actually work that smart I guess? Better just to do the backup by yourself from time to time copying the virtual machine to external disk.
 
JedrzejO said:
So when the SmartGuard is activated it will not actually work that smart I guess? Better just to do the backup by yourself from time to time copying the virtual machine to external disk.
Click to expand...
SmartGuard feature just automates snapshot creation. If you wish to share some suggestions/improvements which can be done in SmartGuard, share it here.
 
Thanks. So what would be currently the recommender solution to backup virtual disk with TimeMachine? Is there any way of creating the incremental snapshots? You say that rather something similar disk clones are created when using the SmartGuard snapshots.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top