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Tuesday November 13, 2007

Parallels - a waste of space?

Do you use Parallels version 3? Have you ever wondered where the hell all of your hard drive space is going?

I know, and now you can too!

When you have the option ‘Mount virtual disks to Mac Desktop’ enabled (which puts a browse-able shortcut to your ‘C’ drive on your Mac Desktop - see below), Parallels is creating a duplicate of the entire Windows disks file structure, wasting valuable space.

For example, when this option is enabled the contents of my /private/ directory is as follows:

sm:tmp sm$ du -sh /private/tmp
du: /private/tmp/1244/C/System Volume Information: No such file or directory
du: /private/tmp/launchd-203.bZ1Kio: Permission denied
du: /private/tmp/launchd-252.CMqLC4: Permission denied
du: /private/tmp/launchd-58.q5A9w4: Permission denied
8.4G /private/tmp

Guess what’s in /private/tmp? A set of sub-directories called 1244/C. And now, the big question: what do you suppose is in C?

sm:1244 sm$ cd C/
.DS_Store Program Files/
.Trashes/ RECYCLER/
5d47ee79998c263c305e59fb76b8/ System Volume Information/
AUTOEXEC.BAT WINDOWS/
CONFIG.SYS boot.ini
DELL/ mfc70.dll
Documents and Settings/ mfc70u.dll
IO.SYS ntldr
MSDOS.SYS pagefile.sys
MSOCache/ pvsw/
NTDETECT.COM test.txt
P9install.lo

Oh, it’s Windows! What a surprise.

To regain my disk space, I disabled the option above and restarted Parallels, then queried my /private/ directory again:

sm:tmp sm$ du -sh /private/tmp
du: /private/tmp/launchd-203.bZ1Kio: Permission denied
du: /private/tmp/launchd-252.CMqLC4: Permission denied
du: /private/tmp/launchd-58.q5A9w4: Permission denied
32K /private/tmp

Hey, whaddya know!

This wouldn’t be so bad, except for the fact that my particular instance of Parallels is already using 20gb of hard disk space (not including a couple of 2gb snapshots - a feature I’m not totally enamored of as of yet). Seems like an awful amount of wasted space to me…not that the functionality isn’t useful or that I have a better implementation.
:)

I just think it’s a waste of space of which I can find a better use. Oh, and did we touch upon the privacy and security issues that this might cause? No? Hmmm…maybe later then.

If you want to save a little space (or at least see how much is being wasted) pop into Terminal (Applications/Utilities) and run the following command:
du -sh /private *.



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2 comments so far to “Parallels - a waste of space?”

  1. AvatarKirkrr
    Reply
    11/13/07

    Set up Windows as a boot camp partition, and point Parallels at it. Gets the best of both world - a OS X mounted Windows partition AND no duplication of files. The added advantage is that you can boot to Windows in the rare instance that something does not run in the VM environment.

    The bad part is a corrupt Windows requires a complete reinstall, unlike copying the VM file over.
  2. AvatarScottMac
    Reply
    11/13/07
    Author Comment

    The bad part is a corrupt Windows requires a complete reinstall, unlike copying the VM file over.

    The other bad part being that it requires actual hard drive space, instead of compressed. An 80gb VM only takes 20gb of Mac space, as opposed to an actual 80gb for BootCamp.
    :)
    Not to mention you lose the functionality to write to the Mac side from Windows (unless you use a 3rd party app).
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