virtualbox.org

Okay everyone, my first post. Having lurked around a bit I can tell this is definitely a knowledgeable helpful community, so thanks for existing and all! So with that said, I've looked around the internets and haven't found much related to my issue. Potentially because I'm not wording it correctly, but you tell me...

So I used the VM Converter to copy a stable version of Windows 7 Pro. Then using that as a guest, still with W7P as the host, I use it to test software, surf, etc. Now I don't know exactly how long this took, a month ish, maybe more, and the guest went from about 30 gigs to 62 gigs in that time. I've ran utility programs and it hasn't really helped, and it's not like I store files or do a lot of swapping; nothing that would really add to the size of the guest.

However here I am, clearly stumped. So please, feel free to ask anything for clarification and I do thank you guys for your time.

Moved to "Windows Guests" since the host is not relevant to the question asked.

VirtuallyCurious wrote:However here I am, clearly stumped.

Stumped about why this happens? In severe cases it's usually because you have some kind of background process that writes to widespread areas of the disk - disk indexing, background defrag etc. You should avoid using any utility that does this inside the guest.

However, I'm not convinced you have a problem. Dynamic disks start off at a minimal size (containing just the guest OS) and grow as you use them. Apart from the bad cases mentioned above the growth should soon stabilize. So, the fact that it grew 30GB in a month doesn't mean that it will keep doing that: in fact it can't, because it can't grow larger than the max size selected when the disk was created. As long as you chose a reasonable max size then you have nothing to worry about.

I advise against taking knee jerk steps to prevent what is in fact normal behaviour.

The alternative to dynamic disks is fixed size disks, which some people choose because they are afraid of the above. Frankly those people are mugs, they have not thought it through. In order to avoid a growing dynamic disk they go for a format which is maxed out on creation... does that even make sense? I don't think so. Then, frightened by the size, they limit the disk size to some arbitrary small number: meaning that the guest OS has a congested drive and poor performance.

Let the dynamic disk find the natural size that reflects your usage. Don't worry about it. If you get one of those one off oops events that maxes out the drive then run a compaction task on it using CloneVDI.

Oh, one final very important step: NEVER use snapshots, as those do eat up disk space like crazy, and that usage is impossible to manage effectively, plus any problem and poof - all your data is gone.

@mpack - Hey, great information! Definitely appreciated as I feel better now, that at least one, it's supposed to happening so there's not a problem and two, it should eventually stabilize. If it doesn't I'll see what other options there are or other methods of managing everything but either way, thanks again for the help!