Grossly Huge VMWare Fusion Disk Image

[IronMac]

Having a bit of a problem with Fusion (latest version) in that the disk image is growing by leaps and bounds. I'm only using it to play Galactic Civilization II and occasionally surf using Firefox. But, it's grown to about 57 gigs.

First off, why is it growing so quickly and so large?
Second, how do I control it or shrink it because at the rate it's going it will consumer the whole HD in about six months!

Thanks!

[IronMac]

Ok, never mind. Figured out how to handle it. The Take Control ebook is great!

[DaviDC.]

You're not going to share your knowledge on this subject?

[mhale62]

DaviDC. wrote:
You're not going to share your knowledge on this subject?

Yes indeed, please do share.

[IronMac]

Ok ok..so the issue is that I did set the Virtual Machine to take up only 40 gigs of space which is the maximum allowed. That's great...glad I bought the 2.5GHz MBP which included a 250 gig drive rather than the 2.4's 200 gig drive.

Problem is that the Virtual Disk seems to be growing. According to the ebook, any sort of changes (adding files, deleting files, etc.) makes it grow bigger. I downloaded a program called GrandPerspective which maps out where stuff is going on my HD and it's telling me that Fusion or WinXP has taken up 58 gigs so far. Shocking!

So, the ebook says to shrink the Virtual Disk:

First, defrag the HD from within the WinXP OS.
Second, shut down the Virtual Machine.
Third, delete all Snapshots.
Fourth, choose Virtual Machines > Settings click Hard Disks. Select HD you want to shrink. Click Clean Up Disk.

I'll try it right now. No big deal if I ruin everything...just reload.

[IronMac]

Jumped the gun...bbiab with a report.

[IronMac]

The following is part of my blog post on how it all went:

Ok, the steps may sound pretty easy but I encountered a couple of problems which are probably my fault. First, the defragging of the hard drive process encountered a problem when Fusion ran a backup. I don’t know what happened but it then could not continue with the defragging process because it could not find a certain file. This became a nightmare of trying to shut down the virtual machine and restarting it and finally I had to use the rollback function to go back to an early snapshot of the system and start again.

I never did do a complete HD defrag as I continued with the deleting snapshot step. Each snapshot can take up to a gig of space and Fusion takes quite a while to first delete and then clean up files. I’ve found that Fusion took a long time with the later snapshots but speeded up quite nicely with the earliest ones. I suspect that this may have to do with the size of the snapshots with the later ones being much larger. In all, this process took about four hours as I periodically came back to the MBP to check.

The last step of shrinking the virtual disk took Fusion about an hour and was a lot simpler. It’s a good idea not to become alarmed if Fusion seems to hang or take a long time doing something. It’s only when you do a Option+Open Apple+Esc and find that it’s no longer responding that it’s time to force-quit Fusion, which I had to do a few times. So, after several hours, Fusion is now 30 gigs smaller in size in a process that Kissel recommends being done every couple of months.

[gabester]

I usually just put all my data on a Shared folder from my Mac, that way I don't have to worry about making a huge virtual disk. Mind you, some software in Windows requires stupid mapped drives and/or placing specific files within %SYSTEMDRIVE%\Documents and Settings\All Users or the user's actual profile, so it's not a universal solution to keeping VM disk images small.

But it's a start.
g=