Need to Recover 0kb Snapshot; Machine Won't Start

[arosborough]

Hello,

I have a virtual machine that I have been doing web development on. I have made significant progress and have been backing the location where my virtual hard drive is stored. I did not realize that snapshots were being kept at a different location (C:\Users\<username>\.Virtualbox...). These did not get backed up.

I have 9 snapshots (.vdi and .sav files) and the 6th one is showing that it is 0KB. I tried running recuva in the snapshot directory and it didn't find anything. Is there a known technique to maintain the changes from the 7th, 8th, and 9th snapshot? I really don't want to have to redo the work that was lost.

Thanks for any feedback!

Andrew

[nardrish]

Hmmm.. I see no responses so far. Well, what's gone is gone. Just so I understand, you now have a working latest version which is working with no issues, correct? If this is the case, I'd suggest that you make a clone using clonevdi tool AFTER you have shutdown your virtual machine. This will ensure you have a full VDI working copy somewhere.

If you can't get it to startup using the 9th snapshot, then try using the 5th snapshot and see if that helps to startup the virtual machine (since the 6th is 0bytes and most likely this has broken the chain resulting in 7th to 9th snapshot not working).

Virtualboxes' Snapshots are good in that it can bring you to the point where you made that snapshot (assuming HDD is not an issue). How it got to 0 bytes, I can't shed light on that.

After you have made the clone VDI, can you try to go back to say the 8th snapshot? Does it work? If it does, then you can try to play around by restoring say the 3rd snapshot and see if that works. For all you know, all the snapshots are working except for the 0bytes which can be discarded!

FYI, when you create a new virtual machine, you can go to Settings, General, Advanced tab and define your path as to where you want the snapshots to be in the "Snapshot Folder" field. But that's for machines which are newly setup or those which currently do not have any snapshots. For existing Virtual Machines with snapshots, you will not be able to make changes here.

Additionally, count the number of snapshots (I'm assuming that you have only 1 virtual machine) in the actual snapshots directory. Are there 9 snapshots?.... more?.... less...?

If there are more, it could be that one of those snapshot files is the missing link and you could be in luck to put it back into the chain.

Let us know how it went for you.

All the best!

Ezra.

[Perryg]

As a go forward suggestions, if you are going to use snapshots and really need to depend on them you should not only backup the snapshots, but the virtualbox.xml and the machine xml so you can recover them. I started out using snapshots and found out like you that they are delicate and easily lost. I now only use a snapshot to protect the VM when I install something. If I find that it is safe and OK merge the snapshot and do not keep them. Instead I cloned the VM ( now I use mpacks CloneVDI tool ) and make a backup of the VDI and move on.