I am running macOS High Sierra and using iCloud Drive. My mac recently ran low on storage so it automatically offloaded a bunch of my documents. This should always be seen as a good thing, it is working as expected. However my Mac offloaded my 20GB Windows Virtual Machine, forcing me to re-download the entire file before I could use Parallels again.
Is there a way to stop iCloud from offloading certain files?
You will need to create a folder one level up to store your VMs. In Finder, click Macintosh HD, then Users, Then your profile (your login name). This is your home folder. Once there, Click on the gear and creat a new folder named Virtual Machines (or just VMs) and move your VMs there.
You can create many different folders here and whey will not sync. Only Desktop and Documents will sync. For example, I have a folder called TEMP that has my draft documents for projects only on my local machine.
Hope that helps!
