Suggestion: Add "Clean and Continue" option when creating new VM

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songyuc
Posts: 2
Joined: 9. Jan 2025, 08:34

Suggestion: Add "Clean and Continue" option when creating new VM

Post by songyuc »

Hi,
I'm a student. I would like to suggest a user experience improvement:

Current issue:
- When creating a new VM with an existing folder, we get an error "Cannot overwrite VM folder"
- Users have to delete the folder using a file manager manually

Suggested improvement:
- Add a dialog asking "Folder already exists. Do you want to:"
[ ] Clean existing folder and continue
[ ] Choose another location
[ ] Cancel

This would make the process more user-friendly, similar to how the Ubuntu installer handles existing installations.

Thank you for considering this suggestion!
klaus
Oracle Corporation
Posts: 1634
Joined: 10. May 2007, 14:57

Re: Suggestion: Add "Clean and Continue" option when creating new VM

Post by klaus »

The "clean" suggestion sounds to me rather dangerous, because the directory could contain useful data which the user may not want to delete, and it's complicated to communicate what's there and what the impact (data loss of a VM?) could be.

That's why VirtualBox plays safe, and just says that something is already there, leaving the cleanup to the user.
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