Size of Virtual Machine File - What Makes It Change?

[elasticmedia]

My windows 7 vm is 96 gigs. I set the Hard Disk 1 size to 64 GB, and it says expanding. I have smart guard enabled and 9 snapshots are the number. I know that after I deleted a bunch of files on my windows, the 96 GB did not decrease.

How do I get it to decrease?
Will it continue to increase?

Thanks
Jim

 

[Parallels User]

You can only regain free space if you compress* the virtual drive, but that requires that you merge/delete all snapshots (also, these snapshots likely still have the files you deleted).
After that, you can evaluate the number of snapshots you need to keep and reduce it via Configure...>Options>Backup.

*
To manually compress virtual disks:
Configure...>Hardware>Hard Disk x>Compress

To automatically compress virtual disks:
Configure...>Options>Optimization> Check automatically compress virtual disks

If this doesn't dramatically reduce used space post the results.

 

[Rishi Chopra]

You can only regain free space if you compress* the virtual drive, but that requires that you merge/delete all snapshots (also, these snapshots likely still have the files you deleted).
After that, you can evaluate the number of snapshots you need to keep and reduce it via Configure...>Options>Backup.

*
To manually compress virtual disks:
Configure...>Hardware>Hard Disk x>Compress

To automatically compress virtual disks:
Configure...>Options>Optimization> Check automatically compress virtual disks

If this doesn't dramatically reduce used space post the results.

Why should the user have to delete their snapshots if what is being stored is just a delta of the changes to the disk file? Please review incident #1563780 and consider that older versions of Parallels Desktop did not have this problem (the space utilized was the space specified and snapshots did not take up as much space as the disk itself!)...