virtualbox.org

I'm a new user of VirtualBox; I previously used Parallels. So far, VB is working nicely for me, however, I'm surprised to learn how much HD space my snapshots/save states are taking. I thought that I could simply delete unwanted snapshots, but I'm warned that merging disk data spread over several image files is a lengthy process. What are common ways people manange this issue. Thank you. (running win7 guest on Yosemite/MBP host)

First, snapshots and saved states are entirely separate features - best not conflate the two. Snapshots will grow like crazy, but there is only one saved state file and its size is fixed (the size will be related to the RAM allocation for the VM).

Most of us avoid the well known disk hoggage and catastrophe-prone issues with snapshots, by simply not using snapshots.

If you use snapshots then it's very important - if you care about your data - that you also make backups of the VM folder to secondary storage. In fact most of us seem to feel that if you have a true backup of the VM folder then snapshots are superfluous.

Thanks, this helps a lot!