Massive Snapshots folder

[tomt]

Hi,

One of my virtual machines is approx 44GB in size, yet its snapshop folder is 137.5GB
Looking at the Virtualbox GUI there are no snapshots shown, as I've not created any.

It appears each time I use 'Save State' a new snapshot is created.
Is there anyway to automatically clean these up so they don't take as much disk space ?

I've shutdown the VM, renamed snapsots to snapshots_OLD and restarted the VM.
It has started up fine and created a new snapshots folder... am I OK to delete the snapshots_OLD folder ?

Thanks

[tomt]

Reading through some forum posts it appears my fails are all saved states .sav files.

As my VM has started up fine with out them, am I save to delete them ?

Thanks

[scottgus1]

You can try opening the VM's .vbox file and see if any of the saved state UUID's (the code numbers in the .sav file's names) are mentioned in the .vbox file. If not, I'd try moving this folder to another place on the host drive for a while before deleting it altogether, or put it on your backups (recommended), and try all VMs. If all VMs work after this folder has been moved, then it may be safe to delete the folder.

[fth0]

Make sure that no VirtualBox process or VM is running (e.g. by rebooting the host). You can then safely delete all .sav files whose filenames are not mentioned in the .vbox file. FWIW, the filenames contain a timestamp and no UUID (@scottgus1: since VirtualBox 4.1 according to the VirtualBox source code).

[scottgus1]

Sure, enough, that is a timestamp, not a UUID! (chant to myself: Check before typing, check before typing... )