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Compacting Virtual Hard Disks

Compacting can be performed only for the expanding virtual hard disks no matter whether they are single-file disks or split disks. For more information on disks formats, refer to Support of Virtual and Real Disks.

Disk Compacting is performed with the help of Parallels Image Tool. While compacting the virtual hard disk, Parallels Image Tool cleans up the unused disk space on expanding virtual hard disks and cuts off the cleaned free space thus reducing the sizes of virtual hard disk image files in Mac OS X. We recommend that you use Disk Compacting Tool on your virtual machines from time to time to save space on the host hard disk.

For instructions on compacting the disk using Parallels Image Tool, see Using Parallels Image Tool or Parallels Image Tool User's Guide.

Note: Compacting of virtual hard disks cannot be performed if the virtual machine has the Undo disks option enabled or if it has snapshots.

If you want to compact the virtual hard disk of a virtual machine with Windows 2003 or later, you may use Parallels Compressor that deletes temporary and unnecessary files from the disk, empties the Recycle Bin, performs disk defragmenting and disk compacting. For details on using Parallels Compressor, see Using Parallels Compressor.

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