Mac is freezing when I run my virtual machine

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Symptoms

I experience various Mac freezes when I run my virtual machine in Parallels Desktop for Mac. What can be done to fix this?

Cause

The list of possible causes may include a lot of various reasons that might lead to such an issue. Below the most common ones are shown:

1. Incorrect work of backup applications running on your Mac/virtual machine, such as Carbonite, Google Backup and Sync, and others.

2. Mac misbehaviour.

Resolution

1. Run First Aid from Recovery.

2. Disable backup applications running on Mac/virtual machine.

If it's possible, try to figure out any misbehaviour in the work of backup applications. There are cases when these applications try to repeatedly back up the same file over and over, and finally, get stuck on this file. In such a case, if it's possible, set this file/folder to not backup in the settings of the backup application. 

3. Disable any applications which synchronize any data, especially inside the virtual machine because such applications might work incorrectly and lead to the incorrect work of the backup applications. For example, when using Microsoft's OneDrive and other cloud-based applications on the Mac side, you may see only some files being accessible from the Windows side. That is because such apps utilize on-demand file access. That means that instead of storing the files on your Mac, they rather display a kind of shortcuts, and only when the file is being accessed by a user, the application downloads the file to Mac, and as a result, it can be shared to Windows.

From our side, we recommend you to share the necessary files from Mac to a virtual machine via shared folders.

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