Can I clean up my vmdk files?

[patjdixon]

I have a tons of vmdk files going back 3 years on my hard disk.  I presume these are snapshot files.  I do not need to preserve snapshots of my machine state.  Some of these files are several gb.  Can I clean up these files and get back some disk space?

[continuum]

Open your vmx-file in a texteditor and check which vmdk is assigned at the moment.

If name-000001.vmdk is assigned you can not delete the name-000001-s00*.vmdk files.
But you can delete the snapshot using snapshot-manager.

[wila]

Hi,

I see Ulli replied now already, I tried to reply this morning, but the forum software refused to post the answer.

Here it is, perhaps it still helps a bit.

The <vmname>-000001-<sliceNN>.vmdk files are indeed snapshot files.

You have 1 snapshot, consisting of up to 32 disk slices.

Note that if you try to delete any of those files in Finder, you _will_ break your VM and are taking a real risk in having severe data loss.

You don't really mention that these files are all from the same VM, but in case they are the following advice applies.

Also you didn't mention the size of your virtual disk, but if your virtual disk is under 640GB in size and you have about 30 GB of free disk space then you can safely commit the open snapshot via the snapshot manager in VMware Fusion.

--

Wil

[wila]

Hi,

One more note...

If the snapshot manager does not show the snapshots from your screenshot then there's another easy way to commit those.

In that case shut down the virtual machine and go to menu:

- Virtual Machines

- Settings

- General

- Click the "Clean Up Virtual Machine" button

This will consolidate all snapshots that are missing from the snapshot manager and reclaim space from your virtual disk(s) of your Windows virtual machine.

--

Wil