Reloading Virtualbox from an external drive?

[Franknj229]

I recently experienced some un-fixable computer issues and had to get a new hard drive. Before the swap out, I backed up everything to an external drive. I should have come here first to ask exactly how to save my VM, but I was rushing, so I just literally copy/pasted anything that said Oracle/Virtualbox/Virtual Machine/etc.

Now that I have everything up and running again, I tried to just copy/paste everything back, but I'm having some issues.

First, I AM able to open my VM (Ubuntu guest running on Vista64 Host, btw). However, it was an old copy of my VM (missing recently saved pics and bookmarks). The first 3 times I opened the VM, I got a pop up message asking if I wanted to "import" some things. I clicked "yes" and each time a new copy of my VM appeared in the main screen. Each copy can be opened, but each one is a different version (chronologically speaking). Unfortunately, none of them are very recent.

I had not taken a snapshot of my VM in quite awhile, but I thought copying all the Virtualbox files to the external would retain everything within the VM.

What should I be looking for in my external drive, how do I get it to my new drive, and how do I get the most recent version to open within Virtualbox?

Thank you for any advice you can provide,

Frank

[mpack]

Moving this topic to "Windows Hosts" as this discussion is not generic.

The first 3 times I opened the VM, I got a pop up message asking if I wanted to "import" some things.

I can't think of any VirtualBox prompt along those lines. I assume you're referring to a guest app, e.g. Office.

VirtualBox holds a list of registered VMs in its <userdoc>\.VirtualBox\VirtualBox.xml global preferences file. The actual VMs are stored by default in <userdoc>\VirtualBox VMs\*. You are somewhat vague about which of these you backed up. Note that "Oracle" is not mentioned on the path to either of these. And of course, backing up the program folder (Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox) is pointless since the software needs to be reinstalled, not copied back.

If you copied both data folders back then you should already be up and running. So what did you actually copy and where?

It's no big deal if you skipped the VirtualBox.xml file, the only effect is that you must re-register the VMs manually, using Machine|Add... and selecting a .vbox file, or by double clicking the .vbox file in the host. Of course if you failed to back up the VMs themselves then they is toast.

I had not taken a snapshot of my VM in quite awhile

Snapshots are not backups, quite the contrary in fact, so this is probably just as well. We do need to know what precisely your real backups consisted of.

What you certainly must not do is build new VMs around the base VDI of an old snapshot-infected VM. If this is what you've been trying then it would probably be best to delete everything you've done and register the restored VMs properly using Machine|Add.