VB 6.1.40 on win10host/win10guest: I often use my guest system as a testbed for trying new stuff. The other day I did something in my guest that utterly screwed it up. Is there a way to get back to the pre-screwed-up state without deleting the whole guest and rebuilding it?
I noticed that the .vdi file is modified when I start up the guest but it doesn't seem to be modified as I use it during the day, so I was wondering if it is possible to safely "nuke" the running guest and get back to the guest as it was before I last started it and messed it up.
Recovering from a broken guest
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Re: Recovering from a broken guest
Yes, it's trivially easy to recover from that kind of failure. You just copy your most recent backup of this VM back to the host PC.BCosell wrote:VB 6.1.40 on win10host/win10guest: I often use my guest system as a testbed for trying new stuff. The other day I did something in my guest that utterly screwed it up. Is there a way to get back to the pre-screwed-up state without deleting the whole guest and rebuilding it?
If you don't make backups then no, you can't recover from a disaster without a lot of work.
It's possible that you can undo the mistake you made inside the guest. That would depend on what the error was.
Re: Recovering from a broken guest
Ah , thanks. I was afraid of that. I assume when you say restore, you mean both the .vbox file and the .vdi file. I'll have to see about backing it up. I rarely make "permanent" changes to the guest system, so I'll be careful to back it up when I change something [e.g., install a new program].
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Re: Recovering from a broken guest
You backup and restore the VM, i.e. the entire contents of the VM folder. Not just a couple of the files. The vdi file(s) will account for almost all of it, so there's no reason to skip the rest - the smaller files contain important info too, such as the hardware id's needed to keep your guest software activated.BCosell wrote:I assume when you say restore, you mean both the .vbox file and the .vdi file.
Re: Recovering from a broken guest
I just checked and the only things in my VB folder are the .vdi and .vbox files and an empty "snapshot" directory and a log directory. I guess I can add the logs to the files I back up..
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Re: Recovering from a broken guest
Do NOT back up a file at a time, back up the entire folder. Don't try to parse the contents. Backing up specific files simply invites new files to be missed, possibly resulting in a useless backup.
Re: Recovering from a broken guest
Thanks for all the advice. I now, as recommended, back up the entire directory. If anyone is interested, I've written a pair of Perl programs that save and restore VMs. It makes two entries in the backup folder
and the text file has a comment describing what/why the backup represents [so if you need to restore you can figure out which backups are which]. Let me know if you'd like a copy of the programs