VirtualBox inaccessible, destroyed all my files.

[mpack]

Oh right, now I see what you mean. Only the OP can clarify if that was the case. Personally I find it unlikely that he'd believe that restoring an old copy of the VDI could be done without data loss, whereas not knowing how snapshots work is a fairly common.

[loukingjr]

Oh right, now I see what you mean. Only the OP can clarify if that was the case. Personally I find it unlikely that he'd believe that restoring an old copy of the VDI could be done without data loss, whereas not knowing how snapshots work is a fairly common.

True again. I was just trying to imagine how this could happen without the use of snapshots.

I do find snapshots useful for exactly one thing. If I have to do a major update or upgrade to a guest, or experiment with some change. I will create one snapshot before I apply the change. If it goes well I can then delete the snapshot. If it doesn't go so well, I can restore the snapshot then delete it. Just saves time over restoring a multi-GB VM from a backup. Although all my guests are backed up anyway.

[elelont2]

Hi,
The vdi file is quite large (40gb), i only had the one copy of it. When i moved the VM to another location i copied the entire VM folder (contains .vdi, .vbox and .vbox-prev files). Also, i did not have the Snapshots directory in the said VM folder. I only created a test Snapshot after it was mentioned here in the thread, i was unaware of this feature.

When it became inaccessible, i just figured VBox messed up again, so ill just remove and readd the vdi file.

Note: By "messed up again" i mean that VBox occasionally deletes the .vbox file. I have to restore it from the vbox-prev file.

Edit: i don't quite understand the clone tool, source is the snapshot.vdi, but what is destination? Do i specify my main .vdi there? For some reason it says that "Destination already exists. Are you sure you want to overwrite it?" as if i am doing the wrong thing. My intention is to get rid of the snapshot i created and clone it inside my main .vdi file. Also, when i click "Yes" on the command prompt it will just reappear in a loop and nothing happens?!

[mpack]

Edit: i don't quite understand the clone tool, source is the snapshot.vdi, but what is destination?

You use the snapshot vdi name as the source, and a new name (or folder) for the destination name. Somewhere down the line, after the clone has been tested, you can delete the original and snapshot VDI. If you're short of disk space then you can move the old files onto an external drive.

I'm still not convinced that I'm getting the whole story here. Creating a snapshot and then bypassing it should not result in substatial data loss, unless you did a lot of work in a short time.

[elelont2]

Does the clone tool find the original vdi automatically then? As i understand it needs the info from the original vdi and the clone vdi.

Again, i did not have any snapshots originally (when it became inaccessible), i created a snapshot after i had lost all my data just to test the feature.

[mpack]

You need to copy the base VDI and the snapshot VDIs into a single folder, then clone the most recent snapshot VDI using CloneVDI as I described in my first post.