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Ph33zy
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Best way to reduce hard disk space

I setup my hard drive in my VM to be 512GB thinking that I would need it.  However it looks like I am only using 110GB and am wondering what is the best way to shrink the hard drive size to something lower such as 200GB so I can reclaim space for my Mac without having to delete my VM and doing a fresh install.

Very new to both Mac and VM so appreciate any guidance.  Thanks.

 

 

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Mikero
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Unless you specified "Pre-Allocate Disk Space" when creating the disk, and haven't taken snapshots, the VM should never consume more than what the guest is consuming, plus some overhead. There's a "cleanup disk" button in the Fusion UI to reclaim some of that overhead if possible. (VM Settings > General > "clean up virtual machine")

Can you verify the size of your .vmwarevm file/bundle?

 

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Michael Roy - Product Marketing Engineer: VCF

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ColoradoMarmot
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inside the guest, if you type 'disk cleanup' into the windows search bar, then right click on it and 'run as administrator' you can potentially free up a lot of space, particularly after some of the recent windows updates that preserve the previous version.   Then run the reclaim function again - I took a VM from 80GB to 40 GB the other day doing this.

 

Highly recommend making a backup of the VM before doing it - it's not reversible.

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Ph33zy
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Bump - any takers or is this impossible?

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Mikero
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Unless you specified "Pre-Allocate Disk Space" when creating the disk, and haven't taken snapshots, the VM should never consume more than what the guest is consuming, plus some overhead. There's a "cleanup disk" button in the Fusion UI to reclaim some of that overhead if possible. (VM Settings > General > "clean up virtual machine")

Can you verify the size of your .vmwarevm file/bundle?

 

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Michael Roy - Product Marketing Engineer: VCF
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Ph33zy
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Okay thanks for the feedback and this makes me feel better;  thanks for clarifying.  

I think I'm all set then:

Pre-Allocate Disk Space is not checked.  

All reclaimable file is reclaimed.

.vmwarevm file is close to what is taken up by guest OS.  

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ColoradoMarmot
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inside the guest, if you type 'disk cleanup' into the windows search bar, then right click on it and 'run as administrator' you can potentially free up a lot of space, particularly after some of the recent windows updates that preserve the previous version.   Then run the reclaim function again - I took a VM from 80GB to 40 GB the other day doing this.

 

Highly recommend making a backup of the VM before doing it - it's not reversible.

Ph33zy
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Perfect - this helped a bunch.  Thanks!

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