virtualbox.org

Hello all,

I would like to know the easiest way capture/export a VB 2.0.4 installation with (many) multiple VMs (inc. snapshots) from one host to another?

I would like to copy my extensive VM setup to another machine whilst I rebuild my main host.

I know I can copy the .VirtualBox\VDI folder over and recreate the VMs, however the number I have makes this a grind.

Is there a nice way to capture the whole install - a registry key perhaps?

I'm using Vista.

Cheers

If you copy the contents of the \.VirtualBox\xxx folder tree to another drive then I believe that should back up all your VMs nicely.

As to restoration: I believe that as long as the root folder name is the same, ie. <root_folder>\.VirtualBox, then after [re]installing VBox you can just overwrite the contents of the .\VirtualBox folder with your backed up content, and that should restore everything back to where it was.

However, one warning: this procedure obviously overwrites the \.VirtualBox\VirtualBox.xml file, and hence you will lose any VMs not included in the backup, so this is not the procedure to follow if you want to merge ported VMs with those already on the new host (there's a more cumbersome manual procedure to follow if you want to do that).