virtualbox.org

Is there a good reason (end user talking) why immutable images are only reset when the VM is power cycled and not simply on a clean shutdown? I tried to come up with a scenario where requiring power cycling would be useful, but I failed to do so. Unless of course someone would want to peek into the differencing image.

The reason why I'm asking is this:

Currently I'm working at home and in my office on the same set of data. I use 'unison' to sync changes back and forth. Of course I could exclude the differencing image from the sync, but just once. The problem with this is that on the target the file would be missing and VB would create another one which then would not be listed in my exclude file anymore... With a reset occurring on power-down this would be solved (small file).

madworm wrote:I tried to come up with a scenario where requiring power cycling would be useful, but I failed to do so

I don't know what reasons the devteam may have had, but I can think of one use for this behaviour, which is if you decide you want to preserve the last set of changes after all - which you would do by shutting down the VM and cloning the difference image. That creates a merged clone which incorporates the changes that would normally be lost.

That's a valid scenario.

Maybe I should file a feature request. I don't see a reason why this couldn't be user selectable. Besides there's still the option to create an online snapshot, which prevents the reset until it is removed again.