If you’re using Parallels Server for Mac, you might have discovered that the ‘Smart Guard’ feature (which automatically saves snapshots of your VM’s) causes all kinds of problems. Parallels has actually recommended that people turn this feature off until they fix it! Here’s an alternative method for automatic VM snapshots. You can call this script daily with iCal or however you like.
set theVms to {"fog", "kurzweil", "pstest", "webprint", "whd"} -- or whatever your VMS are named
tell application "Finder"
repeat with vm in theVms
--make new timestamped snapshots for each VM
set myDate to (do shell script "date '+%m-%d-%Y|%H.%M.%S'") as text
set createShell to "prlctl snapshot " & vm & " -n " & (quoted form of myDate)
do shell script createShell
set theDir to alias ("host:Users:Shared:Parallels:" & vm & ".pvm:Snapshots:") -- or wherever your VM files live
-- delete snapshots more than a week old
repeat with d in (theDir)
if name extension of d is "mem" then
if creation date of d < ((current date) - (7 * days)) then -- find files more than a week old
set deleteShell to "prlctl snapshot-delete " & vm & " -i " & (characters 1 thru -5 of (name of d as text) as text)
do shell script deleteShell
end if
end if
end repeat
end repeat
end tell