Parallels Compressor Working Principles

Compressor processes a virtual machine in the following way:

• defragments virtual disks and cleans up unused space
• compacts virtual disks

The actions performed on your particular virtual machine depend upon the running mode:

• in automatic mode Parallels Compressor compresses only the current system disk performing the pre-defined set of actions
• in manual mode you are able to choose disks to compress and actions to perform

More about running modes and other Compressor properties can be found in Parallels Compressor Help .

Steps of the Compression Procedure

Parallels Compressor is designed to perform the most efficient compression of a virtual machine. The procedure consists of two steps:

• a preparatory step performed in the guest operating system (deleting temporary and unnecessary files, defragmenting virtual disks and cleaning unused disk space);
• a compacting step (reducing the size of the virtual disk files) performed in the primary operating system.