virtualbox.org

Hello,

Situation:
I've a virtual machine A wich some snapshots. At some point, I've made linked clone of that machine - machine B. I've added some snapshots to B. Now, I've decided to clone machine B to be not linked at all to machine A, so I've did full clone of machine B and got machine C.

The problem:
In Virtualbox GUI (and vboxmanage) machine C lists only snapshots I've made on machine B and not those I've made on machine A. But. Virtual Media Manager shows, that my machine C instead of a few disk snapshots I've made in B, has all disk snapshots from the beginning of machine A. I'd like to get rid of them (merge them together), but I can't - I don't see them in GUI, nor vboxmanage snapshot delete does not see UUIDs of those snapshots (and denies deletion). What can I try? The biggest problem here is space - this VM was updated regularly and it took up lots of space.

Discard machine C. Make a new clone of B, this time select full clone, current state only. The new VM will be completely stand alone, with no snapshot structure - no need to merge snapshots,

I'd like to keep the latest snapshots from machine B, but it looks like I'd have to just forgot about them and do a current state only clone.

Sorry to be frank, but you really need to be a bit of an expert if you want to do complex manipulations of snapshotted VMs such as you have been describing, without the whole lot becoming a dangerous spaghetti mess. Life will be much simpler for you (and your VMs will take much less space) if you stick to full clones, no snapshots. Use a big external drive to store backups of your VMs at important times - that's your real "snapshots".