virtualbox.org

I have been using Virtualbox (on the Mac) for some time now with great success, but I am worried as I am now on my seventh snapshot, ie one snapshot nesting inside another snapshot and another etc.. I wondered if someone who understands these things could advise me if this is a safe way to run the program and what I should do to 'normalise' the situation.

Perhaps I am being naive here and it may be OK to continue. I would be most grateful if some one would advise me please.

Paul Tilling

Oh, it's perfectly safe. Or at least as safe as any other house of cards... or at least provided you don't get any wind.

The way to stabilize the situation is to clone the most recent snapshot VDI file, using "VBoxManage clonehd". That gives you a new and merged VDI which you can build a new VM around (don't use the old VM - snapshots accumulate a lot of junk in the xml file too). Just make sure all VM settings are identical to the old ones (in particular IDE controller type, MAC address, IO APIC setting, VT-x setting).

And I recommend in future that if you want to make a restore point, you simply back up your current standalone VDI by copying it to an backup drive (after fully shutting down the VM). You don't need to run a cloning tool, just copy the file as this preserves the UUID. Yes, this does take a little longer than creating a snapshot, but in exchange for that it has the benefit of actually working as a reliable backup strategy.