virtualbox.org

Host OS: CentOS 5.5
Guest: RHEL 5.6
VirtualBox: 4.2.4

I have 2 VM's connecting the same shared disks in a toy cluster setup. I want to make a backup of the current system (both VM's and all the shared disks), so that I can test patching and changing the cluster configuration. The system will be shutdown during backup.

I prefer to make a copy of all the all VirtualBox VM's and configuration files to restore when necessary. Is this supported? Are "VirtualBox VMs" and ".VirtualBox" directories sufficient?

Both Cloning and Export Appliance are not shared disk aware, such that the shared disk were copied for each VM. Will detach the shared disk from one VM and attach the other's fix the problem?

I didn't try Snapshot but this seems even less likely to work.

Any suggestion?

The easiest and preferred way to backup a guest/s is to backup the entire folder that houses the guest/s. All configuration, log, Etc files are stored there (within VirtualBox VMs). Or the entire VirtualBox VMs folder which is where everything is stored by default. The only other file is the VirtualBox.xml file but this file can be replaced and the guest/s added back using the add feature should you need to recreate it.

Thanks for confirming this works! This is actually my preferred way.