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I have a Parallels Desktop VM installed with Windows XP. One day I recognized that the disk usage increased dramatically. I found out that there are multiple files like <diskname>.0.{GUID}.hds :

-rw-r--r--  1 admin  staff   2,1K 14 Nov 00:44 DiskDescriptor.xml
-rw-r--r--  1 admin  staff   2,1K 14 Nov 00:44 DiskDescriptor.xml.Backup
-rw-r--r--  1 admin  staff     0B 19 Mai  2011 Windows XP.hdd
-rw-r--r--  1 admin  staff   3,9G 16 Okt  2011 Windows XP.hdd.0.{36fe3e7b-5f6e-4bf1-b1ad-30f250a92c80}.hds
-rw-r--r--  1 admin  staff    76G 13 Okt  2011 Windows XP.hdd.0.{3fb86d2c-2ffb-46d2-bac0-618dc43e0d83}.hds
-rw-r--r--  3 admin  staff    68G 14 Nov 00:54 Windows XP.hdd.0.{5fbaabe3-6958-40ff-92a7-860e329aab41}.hds
-rw-r--r--  1 admin  staff    16K 30 Okt 08:11 Windows XP.hdd.drh

Which action created new .hds files, are thy related to snapshots ?

Are really all of them used or is only the newest one relevant and others can be deleted ?

share|improve this question
You ask whether the .hds files are related to snapshots... Have you made any snapshots in the dates shown (Oct 13, Oct 16, Nov 14)? If this is the case, if you don't need them, don't delete them from the filesystem, but from whithin Parallels Desktop. See: download.parallels.com/desktop/v4/docs/en/… for information on how to manage snapshots. – jaume Nov 16 '12 at 11:30

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