einstein1969 wrote:
1) How can I set the virtual machine date independently of the host system date after I have done a restore or immediately before?
Independently? Not possible. When a physical PC boots up it gets current time from the Real Time Clock (RTC) chip on the motherboard. Call this timeref1. Once booted it might also get time from a network time server, if it has internet access. Call that timeref2. If you installed the Guest Additions then you can apply a fixed offset to the VM timeref1, but you can't make it truly independent, because no PC "remembers" a time, they all read it from RTC or network.
einstein1969 wrote:
2) Since I often have to copy GB of backup data to the virtual machine disk, I wanted to know if there was an option to avoid it because the copy takes several hours.
I'm tempted to pass on this one since I have no idea what data you are copying into the VM, or why. I will however say that the fastest function on a computer is one that doesn't need to happen at all. I.e. consider less cumbersome alternatives.
einstein1969 wrote:
I have seen that there is a thing called "VISO" maker, but the documentation I have found is scarce to understand.
Yep, the devs keep promising to expands the docs for this feature, or create a fancy GUI interface to it, but I guess it never has priority. A virtual ISO (.viso) is just a little text file that describes the contents of an ISO, so VirtualBox will just pretend that such an ISO exists so you don't actually have to create it. I am attaching a .viso file that I created an an experiment. I believe you can just plonk this file into a folder and it will make the contents of that folder part of the ISO. NOTE HOWEVER THAT IT NEEDS TO BE EDITED. In order to be bootable (which this viso is) it has to include references to a boot folder and several files that would normally be present on a bootable DVD. In my case I already had a bootable Win10ISO folder, so I just inserted a bunch of references to files in that. I suggest you do something similar and correct the path references in the viso file.