virtualbox.org

Hey all.

I have upgraded to VBox 5.2 recentley .
Since the upgrade, the vmdk files started growing without any apparent reason, nothing changed on the machines themselvs.
My vmdk before the upgrade was about 4 GB, and with nothing added it grew to 11 GB.

This happend on 2 linux machines hosted on windows 10 host.

My questions are:
1. Has anyone else experienced this?
2. What can be done to reduce size?

Thank you very much.

What makes this a "Windows Hosts" question? What is the guest OS?

I very much doubt this behaviour has anything to do with VirtualBox. Dynamic media grows when a guest process writes to previously untouched sectors on the drive: no other reason.

It doesn't require "something added", it only requires a sector write. E.g. a background disk defrag doesn't add anything, it just moves things around: that's a lot of sector writes.

Linux hosted on Windows 10.
I don't believe it is related to something the guests did. I think it's something with the new VBox, but of course I may be wrong.
Time to upgrade the HD again...

Upgrading the HD is irrelevant, if you're correct about the growth being uncontrolled. I explained above the only known mechanism for enlarging dynamic media, so that's what you need to take on board and then look at what the guest is doing.

Btw, not a "Windows Hosts" question. Moving this topic to "Linux Guests".