Snapshots take forever

P

punintended

Junior Member
Parallels snapshots of my Windows XP virtual machine take forever. I have also found that it is dangerous to force-quit Parallels while the snapshot process is ongoing. Where to start with troubleshooting?
 
1. Please check you have enough space on Mac OS side, on partition where VM is located,
less space -longer snapshots is taking,
Also, please note, that snapshots are not for backup, but for keeping various stages of VM, software installed
2. Time machine should not be running at that time
 
Thanks John, for the quick reply.

1) I have 50GB available free, and
2) no, Time Machine is not running at that moment

I'm sorry I'm not able to quantify 'forever' - I usually leave the machine when it starts the process - I got tired of waiting. It's at least 20 minutes.
 
Then maybe, for a future release of Parallels, we ought to be able to schedule snapshots? I know there's rudimentary scheduling - once every x hours - but something like Sunday at 1 am would be more convenient...
 
I left my machine doing a snapshot on Saturday morning - when I checked on it last night, it was still going - so more than 24 hours. This is what I mean by long - this isn't the first instance, but the most quantitative I can give you.

I will check out SmartGuard.

Thanks!
 
Right I had/have already adjusted these settings - it's not supposed to take a snapshot more than once every 48 hours. See my screenshot. It's the process of the snapshot, itself, that takes forever.

parallels_snapshot1.jpg
 
I see this too

John@Parallels said:
Hm, I see, it is very strange situation,
Please try to update to build 3810 from http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=32797
and check again, please post results here
Click to expand...

My snapshots have never taken more than a few minutes. Last night it started at 3 AM and was still going this morning at 9 AM. I cannot get out of this state. How do I get my VM back so I can do my work? I cannot shout down Parallels. A force quit restores it to the same hung state.

I am running 3810. But this is the first snapshot after this week's Microsoft patch.....

HELP!
 
Yeah, I'm just going to say: For TimeMachine and Parallels SmartGuard Snapshots to work seamlessly you do need a powerful machine with plenty of space... I'm not bragging here guys, but I too have struggled with it in the past when my machine wasn't BOTH 1-Fast enough (CPU/RAM/disk throughput) 2- Plenty of drive space both on the host drive, as well as the backup drive. Here's what works for me, with no issues at all:
  • iMac Pro (2017) 3.2GHz 8-Core Intel Xeon W 32GB 2666MHz DDR4 1TB SSD (301GB free).
    AND
  • My VM(s) itself(themselves) resides in a JOBD RAID array with 5 "old" SSDs, measuring up 1.73TB total, and currently I have 1.13TB out of the 1.73TB free (free space is very important for SSDs to function properly.)
    AND finally
  • My backup drive is a regular 4TB HDD (Seagate Ironwolf Red) - TimeMachine itself does need room to breathe as well...!
With the configuration above, everything is fast enough that I can work without issues. Occasionally, SmartGuard notifies me it's about to take a snapshot while I am doing something important in the VM(s). In those cases I just click to postpone the snapshot and I am good to go. I leave my host machine always on, and then the snapshots happen when I am not using the host or the VMs.

I hope this helps. Best, Raphael.
 
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