virtualbox.org

Like many other people here, I foolishly created snapshots of my XP guest when what I guess I should have done was to clone them.
I now have a single VM with two snapshots, plus my current state. All files are VDIs.

The snapshots have grown so much that there is not much space left on my laptop's hard drive. Yikes!

Instead of the two snapshots, I would like to have three different virtual machines, compacted as much as possible.
Reading through the forums, a lot of information on getting out of this situation seems outdated, so I hope you all will not mind the new thread.

What is the best way to get from where I am now, to where I want to be, with three compacted virtual machines?

From what I have read so far, it seems like the best course of action is the following. Please tell me if there is an easier way! And thanks.

A. Follow the directions by "zunny" to move all my guests to an external hard drive. Once the guests are running from the external drive, delete the files on the laptop drive. The original directions by "zunny" are here.
B. Create three clones of the VM with all its snapshots using the GUI
C. For the two clones that should correspond to one of the two snapshots, restore each of the snapshots as current state.
D. Clone each of the snapshots again using the GUI, this time keeping only the current state
E. Run CloneVDI to compact the snapshots
F. Follow the same directions as in Step A, but copying only the folders corresponding to the compacted snapshots back to the laptop's internal hard drive.

The procedure you reference talks about moving one VM to another drive, which is not really relevant to the problem you outlined.

If you can run CloneVDI then it should be fairly easy. Just tell CloneVDI to clone each of the snapshot VDIs. In each case the result will be a standalone VDI representing the selected state. Of course since you're low on disk space on the laptop then you'll probably need a second drive to output the clone VDI to. You can run tell CloneVDI to compact while it's making these clones.

Once the clones are made then next step is to delete all of your existing VMs and create new ones around the clone VDIs. If you started this process by making a backup of your old "VirtualBox VMs" folder then you can use the old .vbox files as a reference (held in a text editor) while you create the new VMs. Make sure the hdd controller type is the same as the old VM, likewise network MAC address and IO APIC setting. You must not attempt to mount any of the clone VDIs in the original VM.