virtualbox.org

My snapshots don't appear to go away. I've deleted all the snapshots so only "current state" remains. Yet, when I look at the .vdi files in .Virtualbox/ I see the original Vista32.vdi and two other uuid type .vdi files. Scanning the xml files, I see them referenced, but the VBox gui doesn't acknowledge them.

More concerning is that the latest snapshot "appears" to be what is used both from a file modification time and what is referenced in the VM's configuration XML file (again, the VBox gui doesn't indicate any of this)

I'm wondering if I can just whack the other .vdi files and rename the current snapshot file... or do some cloning thing.. or some magical / obscure CLI incantation. I'd rather not drag around 3x the disk space when I back up (I'd do a more conventional cloning for backup but can't figure out how to use clonehd)

I've looked through many of the threads in this forum and what I can find through Google etc. Snapshots, backups, cloning remain undocumented and a bit of a mystery. Apparently there's a reason one can't clone a VM and its settings, what clonehd does when there are snapshots, how to use clonehd in general. Such questions are often answered with "search the forums" or RTFM... which yields circular references in both cases (the VBox documentation has a 3 link circular reference to not explaining clonehd, snapshots and disk management...)

So I figured I'd ask anyways figuring I may get the RTFM response even though I've done so to no avail.

-glenn

Ah snapshots. I don't use them. Well only just before I try to do something that could kill the VM, but once I am sure it is OK I merge them, or if it turns out bad I discard it.
Now to your problem. Close VBox and then add .old to the end of the files that you think are not included any longer. The start VBox and the guest. If it does not complain about it after a while you can more than likely delete them.

As for the clonehd why don't you post what the command is you are using and explain what happens when you do this. I'll look it over and see if i can tell where it is failing.
Also if you want you can put clonehd site:forums.virtualbox.org and see the solutions that others have used. You might want to save the search for future use and then replace the clonehd with any of your keywords. We are in most of the big search engines so this will work on most of them.