Problems with file deletion - The hard disk is continuously filled.

[MrRootBun]

Hi all,

We've got problems in our company using VMWare Workstation 10. We use Windows 7 64 as a host and differents OS as guest like Windows XP.

The problem is we need to use that old OS (Windows XP) as a guest due to machinery requirements.

We normally have to copy large files around 1GB or even more 2 or 3GB from the guest to the host, but when we do this,

We do not know what is happening that We erase the original file in the guest and move the copy file from the host to an external hard drive, but the space taken by

the file originally it remains. I clarify this with an example:

1. We've got 60 GB in the host.

    We've got 20 GB in the guest.

2. We download 2GB from the guest.

So now We've got 58 GB in the host, and 18 GB in the guest.

3. We copy the 2GB file from the guest to an external hard drive.

We still have 58 GB in host and 18 GB in the guest.

And now is when it comes the problem.

4. We erase the file from the guest, so now We have 20 GB in the guest, but

the host remains in 58 GB, so We do not recover the 2GB space, and We do not have the file, cause We copy to an external hard drive.

And if we do this another time, it happens the same.

That is the reason why We're running out of space in our hard disk every time we do this.

Important to Know:

We do not take snaphots in our guest.

In Snapshot manager We do not have snapshots.

My question is:  Are there snapshots saving in the background or anything like this?, We've being doing research about this, but We do not find the answer.

What it is Datastore in Workstation cause We heard something about this.

Thanks for all, and if We do not find the answer We'll go to support.

[wila]

Hello,

Disk space used by a file does not automatically get reclaimed by the host. The space is used by the guest even while the file is erased, the data is still there.

The space that was previously used by the file will be used by new files, but as that process is up to how windows assigns new space it might actually allocate new space instead of re-use the previously deleted file space.

There are ways to reclaim the deleted space from within the host, but it requires the guest to be shut down and to run a rather time consuming reclaim process.

What is probably best to do in your case is to add another virtual disk of about 4GB in size and copy your large file on there.

When you delete it, the space won't be reclaimed, but it will never take more as 4GB. Next time you copy a file onto the new virtual disk it will re-use that space.

---

Wil

[MrRootBun]

Ok, wila, thanks.

We'll prove what you said.

I hope this works.