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I've been running a Server 2008 guest on an XP x64 host with VBox 2.2.0. My host had a hardware failure and had to be replaced. The new host is Server 2008 x64. I have an Acronis backup from the day before the crash. My problem is that, although I can copy over the .vdi file, create a new guest, and open it with no errors, all the data is from 12 days ago. I've tried several combinations of .vdi and .xml files as well as different versions of Virtualbox, but most attempts cause the guest to not open at all.

I need to recover a lot of work from the last 12 days. How can I get back to the day of the last backup?

Why not create a new instance of Server 2008 and attach the old VDI as a second drive and see if you can retrieve your data?

jmosheim wrote:My problem is that ... all the data is from 12 days ago.

Were you using snapshots before the crash?

Also, you mention having an Acronis backup, but you don't mention attempting to restore from this backup, have you tried that?

If I'm right that you are trying to restore a damaged snapshot chain then I personally would forget that idea, create a new VDI, and restore from the Acronis backup into it. I would also stop using snapshots in future, just make backup copies of the VDI instead.

I did try restoring .vdi and .virtualbox folder from Acronis backup, but could not get this to open.

Doesn't the .vdi get updated every time the machine is shutdown? I closed it right before taking the last backup.

jmosheim wrote:I did try restoring .vdi and .virtualbox folder from Acronis backup, but could not get this to open.

Oh, I see. You have an Acronis backup of the host, I thought you meant you had a backup of the VDI made by running Acronis inside the guest.

What do you mean when you say you "could not get this to open"? Do you mean that you couldn't access the contents of the Acronis backup (rather pointless backup regime in that case! ), or do you mean that the recovered VDI was not usable? If the latter, what was the actual problem?

Also, you didn't answer my first question: had you used snapshots? In other words, is this a snapshot chain repair problem? This is important because I suspect your problem may simply be incorrectly recovering the chain, perhaps you are only recovering the base VDI.

jmosheim wrote:Doesn't the .vdi get updated every time the machine is shutdown? I closed it right before taking the last backup.

Yes, closing down the VM should have closed the file handle on the VDI, flushing any pending writes.

It all depends HOW the backup was done, there are 3, 4 methods other then a plain copy, it also depends within this context when the last successfull backup was made. Could there be some sort of caching going on that did not get to flush its buffers at crashtime? If I look at one of my servers backup it has the date/time of when it was started, but I know it also contains current data eventhough it doesn't show up evendently.