Snapshots unusable

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YadinF
Posts: 3
Joined: 1. Feb 2021, 06:48

Snapshots unusable

Post by YadinF »

I'm more than a little baffled that Snapshots really aren't a usable feature after all these years.

- If you use snapshots, drag and drop from host to guest does not work. D&D only works if there are no snapshots.
- Managing snapshots does not work. They do not delete, they do not restore, these functions just don't do anything at all. The only way to roll back to the original image is to detach all the media, delete the snapshot folder, delete the orphans in the media manager, re-attach the vdi to the vm.

I couldn't find any mention of the first issue but it's easily reproduced. The second issue I found going back to v3. Apparently managing snapshots has never worked/ been reliable. So the only option for maintaining an original to roll back to while having a functional experience is making full clones.

For a product Oracle wants you to pay for if you're not a home user, rather astounding that it's just not usable past base features.
scottgus1
Site Moderator
Posts: 20965
Joined: 30. Dec 2009, 20:14
Primary OS: MS Windows 10
VBox Version: PUEL
Guest OSses: Windows, Linux

Re: Snapshots unusable

Post by scottgus1 »

YadinF wrote: If you use snapshots, drag and drop from host to guest does not work.
[Citation needed] For as long as drag & drop has been out, failure to have working D&D when a snapshot is being used would have come up before now. Drag & drop actually is driven by Guest Additions, which might not have been installed in you earlier snapshots. If this is the case D&D would only work when working Guest Additions are running.

Please provide evidence showing that your D&D does not work when a snapshot is being used.
YadinF wrote:They do not delete, they do not restore, these functions just don't do anything at all.
They work just fine on the VM's I have used them on. An exception probes the rule. So please provide evidence that they do not work on your host. Use an experimental VM to test on.
YadinF wrote:Apparently managing snapshots has never worked/ been reliable.
I'm in partial agreement with this one. Except that the problem has almost always been failure by the user to fully understand what a snapshot is or how the commands work. Lots of folks think snapshots are backup images, which they most definitely are not. "Delete" took me a really long time to wrap my head around. It was when a forum guru Mpack pointed out that snapshots are like time-travel markers in the VM's history, somewhat like Windows System Restore Points, that I grokked "Delete". It means to delete the ability to access that snapshot's history point. None of the data in the snapshot is actually deleted, though: all the data gets merged back into the parent of the deleted snapshot. Snapshots make a VM more delicate and should only be used on VMs one does not care about. All VMs should be backed up with file copy of the VM folder while the VM has been fully shut down from within the VM OS.
YadinF wrote:For a product Oracle wants you to pay for if you're not a home user, rather astounding that it's just not usable past base features.
Snapshots are a base feature, not part of the "home user" PUEL Extension Pack.

Please provide evidence of the drag-n-drop problem here, and put evidence of the failure to delete or restore in a different topic, per One issue per thread
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