virtualbox.org

firstly, I wish I'd read the article on snapshots first, or I wouldn't have deleted snapshot 1 and expected snapshot 2 to work...

However, I had, somewhat earlier, copied the whole "snapshot" folder to another machine, and have tried to copy it back to the Linux Mint machine it was originally on. However, it starts to copy, gets to about 1Gb copied and then crashes with "read only" error.

I do have the (7 year old) original and have been able to recover the basic Win-XP machine VM from that, but will obviously have to do a lot of reconfiguring. I've not last data - thats all backed up elsewhere, but it would be good if possible to reload my copied "snapshots" file to save a load of time.

Is this possible - or should I forget the idea and carry on reconfiguring?

nry81 wrote:However, it starts to copy, gets to about 1Gb copied and then crashes with "read only" error.

1. If you got a read-only error message than it wasn't a crash, it was just an error message.

2. "Read-only" means that there was a conflicting file in the target folder. Please be more precise about this error report - it makes no sense that it would get a good way through the copy operation before noticing that it can't create a file. Normally with a file conflict you get an error right at the start of a file copy, and you choose to keep one file or the other. That's up to you to decide. I also don't know why the target file would be read-only unless it was deliberately flagged or is currently being used, but perhaps that's a Linux-ism I'm not familiar with.

3. If you are trying to merge the backup with the current VM then be sure not to restore the then current state (the final snapshot in the backup), as that was not frozen and probably changed after the backup was made. Personally I would only restore the snapshot VDIs that are missing.

ah - when I tried the copy I was asked if I wanted to overwrite the original snapshot of the same name, and its after that that I got a read error. Am I right in thinking, then, that if I remove the current "snapshots" folder to elsewhere, and copy in the one I backed up a while ago, it might work?

As I said, I would only restore the files that need to be restored, i.e. the ones you deleted.

ok, understood, thanks, but Im still not 100% sure if ALL I need to copy back is just the snapshot VDI in question, or more bits from that folder. I'm way out of my comfort zone with this!

Provided you made no attempts to "repair" the damage caused by the missing files (e.g. you didn't hand edit the .vbox file), then all you need to do is restore the missing files.

OK - I shall give it a try! thanks

hugh