are vdi compressed?

[adrianh]

I didn't think that they were but I found that I made a 4GB vdi Standard type, formatted it to ext4 and then filled it. df gave the following:

/dev/sdb1                 3.9G      3.7G         0 100% /mnt/sdb1

but from the host system, it shows:

2.5G backupDrive.vdi <-- from mingw
2,609,926,144 backupDrive.vdi  <-- from cmd

$ vboxmanage showhdinfo backupDrive.vdi  <-- from host
UUID:                 a25e23cd-186e-44c4-9b2a-724612811faa
Accessible:           yes
Logical size:         4096 MBytes
Current size on disk: 2489 MBytes
Type:                 normal (base)
Storage format:       VDI
Format variant:       dynamic default
In use by VMs:        BackupServer (UUID: 4b5cb0de-fe6f-4f7a-9ac9-59a869d3d955)
Location:             C:\Users\Adrian\VirtualBox VMs\BackupServer\backupDrive.vdi


$ sudo du -sh /mnt/sdb1  <-- From guest
3.7G    /mnt/sdb1

The host is a Windows 7 box, the guest is Tiny Core Linux.

Does anyone know anything about this?


A

[adrianh]

Oh, never mind. It was because I had a snapshot active and it stored the difference in another file.

Too bad, that would have been awesome!


A