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confused about snapshot cleanup

Posted: 4. Nov 2013, 21:18
by mlcampbe
I have been making snapshots of images for various things and just recently decided I no longer need the old snapshots. I went into virtualbox manager and for the image clicked on the snapshot optiona and found I had several listed. I really only want to save the very latest one so I decided to delete/merge the previous snapshots.

So before doing anything I had a snapshot struture like this:

- name 1
--- name 2
----- name 3
------- current state

I wanted to get rid of name1 and name2 snapshots which I did by choosing delete and then it says it will merge the data. So far so good as I now see what I wanted in vbox manager.

However, what I expected to happen on the disk was that it would clean up the Snapshots directory. When looking in that directory I see the following files:

{f28e9cda-2ded-4680-b270-47c2ac9cfbf6}.vdi - modified today
2012-09-07T13-56-23-233560000Z.sav - modified Sept 7, 2012
2013-04-12T12-35-43-874030000Z.sav - modified Apr 12, 2013
2013-09-18T13-57-54-245086000Z.sav - modified Sep 18, 2013
2013-11-04T19-06-42-732788000Z.sav - modified today

Given that 3 of the 4 sav files are old are these still needed? Could they be deleted to save disk space or are they still used even though the date is not updated?