I'm not sure the following is stated correctly - please bear with me. Is it possible to merge all VM snapshots into a base image? If so, how do you do it? My production Windows VM has a very large (almost 1 TB) oldest snapshot and two relatively small (15 GB and 30 GB) newer snapshots, which I'm guessing are the "last weekly" and "last daily" snapshots that are alluded to in various documentation. It's not clear to me whether there is also a base image that's the starting point (so the oldest snapshot would contain a delta from that image) or if the oldest snapshot is relative to an empty virtual disk. The problem I'm trying to solve is that every time Parallels wants to delete the oldest snapshot (once a month, I'm guessing - is that right?) the process takes an extremely long time - many hours sitting at "deleting snapshot". The new "oldest snapshot" is then about 1 TB and a subsequent Time Machine backup of the Mac also takes forever because it has to back up the entire 1 TB snapshot instead of one or two small ones. So the real question is, how do you accomplish having only small snapshots with the majority of the hard disk data being in a static base image of some sort? Or does Parallels not do that? I've searched for documentation on Parallels snapshot implementation and found "working with snapshots" and descriptions of using snapshots to save state before making changes you might want to revert to the previous state. But really nothing on the questions I've got. Any help, advice, or explanation would be greatly appreciated!
Never mind. I didn't realize that deleting all snapshots will do this. I was hesitant to try because I was concerned it would revert the hard disk to the state before the first snapshot (which was right after Windows installation with no applications software installed or personal data restored.) I cloned the VM and tried it on the clone and found that it does what I want.
We are glad that the issue is resolved. You can exclude the PVM from Time Machine backup and take manual backup. You can also disable Smartguard to avoid automatic snapshot creation.
