In VMWare Workstation and vSphere ESX, it is possible to set disks to be independent so they are not linked to snapshots. Independent disks can then be set to be Persistent (changes are written immediately and permanently to disk) or Non-persistent (changes are lost when the VM powers down). In VMWare Fusion, although this option does not seem to be present, it is still available, and can be configured by manually changing the parameters in the VM configuration file (.vmx).

A VM configuration file is a text-based file containing all the parameters and properties for a VM. This file can include options that are not present in the Fusion UI. By adding parameters manually, you can enable featu  ...