virtualbox.org

Hi,

Over the last few weeks, I've taken a number of snapshots of my virtual os, as I was a bit paranoid regarding breaking it whenever I installed a new application. Anyway, now I've got too many snapshots and I've noticed they take a lot of disk space.
Is there a way to delete a few of them, without loosing the most recent stuff of course ! What is the approach to this ? Also I don't wan to delete the oldest ones as I'd like to be able to get back to these states, however some in the middle are useless and I want to get rid of them.

Thanks

It's a bit hard to only remove the middle ones, as they still contain data needed for the proper operation of the child snapshots. You can however merge these with the parent snapshot of it. To get things straight, let's say you have 5 snapshots, and you want to keep number 1, 2 and 5. The tree would look like this:

• snapshot one (1)
  • snapshot two (2)
    • snapshot three (3)
      • snapshot four (4)
        • snapshot five (5)

What you want at the end, is this:

• Snapshot one (1)
  • Snapshot two (2), with the data of snapshots 3 and 4 in it
    • Snapshot five (5)

Now you need to select snapshot 3 and 4, and revert it's data with the previous snapshot, snapshot 2. You won't free up any space with this, because, as I said above, you need it's data for proper Guest OS operation. Reverting the snapshot will merge the data with it's parent snapshot. You must use the icon with only one ^ on it. Using the other icon, with 2 ^ on it will remove the state, but will probably also remove all child snapshots, something you don't want.

So, to make a long story short, you will only clean up the snapshot tree, not hard disk space.