virtualbox.org

Virtual Box Version: 6.1.26
Controller: IDE
* manjaro-kde-21.1.3-210916-linux513.iso
Controller: SATA
* VDI
* Fixed size storage
* Type: Normal
* 40 GB
No guest additions were installed once the guest was created.

Host:
* Windows 7 64-bit
* Memory: 32 GB
Guest:
* Arch Linux 64-bit
* Memory: 20 GB

Problem:
Every time I shut down the guest all changes that were made to the system is lost. During the shutdown process everything on the front-end appears to be fine. The only error messages I found in the logs were not informative on why this was happening.

Are you sure that you have installed the Manjaro Linux system to the virtual harddisk and are running from there?
As far as I can see the guest boots from the DVD just into a live Linux mode.

Manjaro2-2021-09-18-00-47-56.log wrote:

00:02:33.078697 /Public/Storage/AHCI0/Port0/BytesRead       4670976 bytes
00:02:33.078710 /Public/Storage/AHCI0/Port0/ReqsRead            222 count
00:02:33.078720 /Public/Storage/PIIX3IDE0/Port0/BytesRead 569245696 bytes
00:02:33.078730 /Public/Storage/PIIX3IDE0/Port0/ReqsRead      12312 count

The VM statistics also show that the virtual hard disk has not been written to during this VM run (BytesWritten would only show up when not 0). The ~4 MB read indicate that it's probably not completely empty, though.