Take Control of Running Windows on a Mac, 3rd Edition

Choose a Strategy

You can cope with (or at least mitigate) this potential problem in any of several ways. Depending on your needs and preferences, you may want to adopt one or more of the following approaches.

Take Snapshots

When you create a snapshot, your virtualization software does something interesting: it stops modifying your existing virtual disk file(s) and creates one or more new files, which then contain all the changes you make to your virtual disk. When you take the next snapshot, the virtualization program stops modifying files from the previous snapshot and creates another new file (or files) to hold the updated data.

These new files, like your virtual disk itself, start out quite small and grow only as needed. They therefore serve ...