Portable images

[sorensenbrad]

I have Virtualbox installed on both my home and work computer, I want to be able to take my Virtualbox virtual machines and snapshots back and forth for testing purposes.

I created all my OS's on my work computer with fixed 8gb partitions.
What do I copy over to my 64gb usb thumb drive so I can use the same Virtual machines at home as well as at work.

I created the following virtual machines (xp,vista,7 and linux)

Thanks

[Sasquatch]

You need to copy the whole .VirtualBox folder to the drive (folder located in your user profile) and set the environmental variable VBOX_USER_HOME to the thumb drive, on both systems. Hopefully, that works.

[sorensenbrad]

Thanks for the response however Im brand new to VirtualBox what do you mean by
"set the environmental variable VBOX_USER_HOME to the thumb drive"
Sorry to ask but what do you mean? Instructions for the newbie please.

Are you saying to change the path under
file
preferences
general
then change the path for default hard disk to folder and default machine folder to point to my USB drive?

[Sasquatch]

It's all in the manual about the variable. Check Google for how to set system or user environmental variables on Windows. I don't really know where it is in Vista, I know where it is on XP (it's on System properties, tab Advanced where you will find a button for it).

[Perryg]

Perhaps this will help for your Vista. Just edit the path and add the complete path to the VBox file. In my case it was F:\.virtualbox. Separate the statements with a ;

[sorensenbrad]

Thanks so the change is on the 2 host machines or within each virtual machine I created?
I looked within Sun virtualbox doesnt these settings have to be changed as well so it points to the usb drive? after the .VirtualBox folder has been copied to the usb drive or course.

open virtual box
file
preferences
general
then change the path for default hard disk to folder and default machine folder to point to my USB drive folders?

[Sasquatch]

The variable needs to be put on the Host systems, not the VMs. They don't know about the Host or the location they are, all they thing is that they are running on a real computer.

The settings, after moving the folder and setting the variable, must be made by hand in the settings files themselves, not through the VB GUI (the VMs will be listed as inaccessible anyway, if a VM is listed at all). The files that need to be changed are each machine.xml file and the main VirtualBox.xml file. You need to change the location from relative paths to full paths. This is needed, because the relative paths start from the user profile, not the location of the VirtualBox.xml file (not really sure about that though, but better be on the safe side).