virtualbox.org

I have found several post regarding deleting vs merging snapshots but the information is conflicting and confusing. This is partly because the features changed in VB since 3.2.x.
It would be great if someone could write a short tutorial on this.
In contrast to the message that comes up when trying to delete a snapshot, it appears that that nothing is ever "merged"?

Regardless If I delete a snapshot at the bottom or in the middle, neither the parents nor child snapshots are changed (merged). When doing these tests, I made sure that I always restored the deleted snapshot's parent or child before starting the VM . Otherwise, the current state would of course be loaded instead of a parent/child snapshot.

p.s. I am not sure if it makes a difference, but I am using VMs based on a Shadowcraft plugin (it creates an XPS file which I point to as the virtual hard disk)

I am still confused about deleting snapshots...
I deleted a few snapshots in a chain and now I get an error when I try to start the VM!?
I thought that I could delete any snapshots in a chain, e.g.any snapshot 1.x
Main
--- Snapshot 1
------ Snapshot 1.1
---------- Snapshot 1.1.1
------------- Snapshot 1.1.1.1
---------------- Current
------ Snapshot 1.2
--- Snapshot 2
------ Snapshot 2.1
---------- Snapshot 2.1.1


What is the correct procedure for deleting snapshots?

viking wrote:I have found several post regarding deleting vs merging snapshots but the information is conflicting and confusing. This is partly because the features changed in VB since 3.2.x.
It would be great if someone could write a short tutorial on this.
In contrast to the message that comes up when trying to delete a snapshot, it appears that that nothing is ever "merged"?

I find it confusing that people expect that snapshots should be changed/merged. A snapshot is the state of a VM as of a particular time, and thus "merging" them is totally meaningless. If the remaining snapshots would be changed in any way that would be a major bug. For snapshots there are three sensible basic operations: create a new one, revert to one and delete one. VirtualBox offers them all. In the future we might offer operations which delete several snapshots, but that's just saving mouse clicks and disk I/O.

The fact that snapshot deletion may or may not require in image merging is probably what sends everyone's brain to outer space, but it's something which must not be mixed with snapshots. Earlier versions of VirtualBox did this, and that caused more confusion than it solves, which is why any requests to mess up our terminology again is futile. VirtualBox automatically performs the necessary image merge operations as part of snapshot deletion so that the remaining snapshots are represented with the minimum amount of storage. Logically no other snapshot is affected by this, so the dialogs don't talk about it.