Snapshots inside Virtualbox

I'd like to install a snapshot program, such as Comodo Time Machine (CTM), inside an XP VM that I run with Virtualbox. Would CTM be a good choice or would you recommend something else? I'm not up on the differences between Returnil, CTM, Time Freeze, etc, so any help is appreciated.

 

Doesn't Vitualbox have it own snapshot ability like Vmware?

 

yes it does, i love that feature. its quite efficient in the amount of space the snapshots take up.

 

Thanks, I had read that, but I couldn't find anything in the Virtualbox help. I just noticed the snapshot button in the UI so I need to give that a try. Is there any documentation for the feature?

 

The snapshot functionality is explained here:

http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01.html#snapshots

There's no need for any 3rd party utils such as CTM,since the snapshot facility works superbly in my experience.

 

Terrific, thanks!

 

You're welcome Victek123

The only thing to note is that whilst the likes of CTM automatically create a current snapshot before restoring an earlier one;you'll need to do this manually with Virtualbox.

 

One thing I would like to advise with the VB snapshot feature that wasn't initially intuitive to me at first was the process of removing old snapshots without crippling your entire virtual OS. You can not simply delete old snapshots that have children etc.

My situation was I had a base install, then had several monthly patched or changed snapshots. After a while I wanted to delete the older images, simply hitting delete will cause your entire system to corrupt. You can play musical chairs to merge them, however I wanted to do it the proper way, thus to delete older images:

You must remove the disk image from the Virtual Media Manager. Only once this is done, should you remove the disk image from the Snapshots menu.

What am I rambling about?

1)First restore your Virtual Machine's state to the latest snapshot; you can do this using the Snapshots menu in the main window.

2) Go to File -> Virtual Media Manager -> expand the relevant hard disk (In your case XP). There should be a '+' symbol next to it. This symbol indicates there are snapshots attached to this disk image. (There may be multiple '+' signs in the form of a tree under your main hard disk. Those correspond to all your snapshots that you've taken over time for that one image.)

2) If you click on each and every item in that entire tree; you'll find that only 1 or 2 snapshots are actually 'attached' to your virtual image. Those are the only ones that you need. The older snapshots will be in a 'non-attached' state and can be removed. You can just highlight each of them and then remove them.

3) Once your 'Virtual media manager' is 'clean' and only the current snapshot is 'attached' you can now go to the Snapshots tab; right click and remove all the snapshots you did not want. VirtualBox will do a few merging operations and eventually leave you with only the current snapshot.

This may sound confusing at first, but only is a 15 second operation after you run through it once and is the safe way to remove older snapshots.

 

Thanks, I will check it out. I'm guessing you learned this the hard way...

 

That I did

 

Yeah I was wondering how to do that as well. I have VM workstation and I couldn't find where to manage snapshots. At least ones that were children. Thanks for the info.