virtualbox.org

Hey,
I am planning to prepare a few win 10 reference images using Virtual Box.

Each of them will have different preinstalled software, different printers etc.
I will start from installing all updates and common software. Then i'm gonna capture VM snapshot. At this stage after capturing snapshot i will install more features to my win 10 and then 1st reference image will be created. After this i would like to load snapshot mentioned before and prepare another reference image (with other software etc.)

Is this method safe ? By loading snapshot i mean loading exactly the same state of vm (and my rough win 10) like during creating the snapshot. I dont want any additonal files on my win 10. Is my understanding proper ?

Google search snapshot problem site:forums.virtualbox.org.

Summary: your proposed technique has all the structural stability of a house of cards, which is effectively what it is. A single point failure can cause the loss of almost all your data. And for what? To save a little disk space? Even that is mistaken, because snapshots actually take more disk space than the more robust alternative described below.

Get yourself a big external USB drive. Create your template VMs as stand alone clones, not snapshots. Every time you want to preserve one template state, copy the entire VM folder to the USB drive. You need only have one VM on your internal hard disk at a time.

You might consider multiattach mode, see section 5.4.5 in the manual.
To keep data, if a guest should fail, use a secondary write-through disk for data, or shared folders.