![]() ![]() ![]() Snapshots with multiple child VDIs will not be merged, processing will stop if this situation is encountered. ![]() The -skip=N and -count=N options limit the merge to a snapshot subset. Snapshots are merged starting with the current snapshot, then moving through the parents, until all parent snapshots have been merged into the base VDI.If you’re unfamiliar with the workings of VirtualBox snapshots and VDIs there is a great set of FAQs and Tutorial: All about VDIs in the VBox forums. The merge almost halved the size the compaction brought it to to below 10% of the original total size.Ĭompacting without first zeroing out free space on the guest file system generally provides no or very little benefit. Here’s an example of the savings on one of my Windows XP guests (it has a 50GB logical HDD): Before merge Base VDI plus 13 snapshots totaling 90.1GB After merge Base VDI 46.0GB After zeroing and compacting 8.1GB (see Compacting VDIs below). Snapshot VDIs grow with every previously unallocated guest OS write and it’s not long before the total size of a machine’s base VDI plus snapshots exceeds than the machines logical HDD size (this is a very good reason why it’s not a good idea to oversize your hard disks). The more VirtualBox snapshots you have the more disk space you consume. This post is obsolete: a much easier way is to use the VirtualBox VM Clone command - see Update December 2013: An easier way to merge snapshots in my Cloning and Copying VirtualBox virtual machines blog post. The script merges a snapshot branch into the base VDI with a single command (it also illustrates how easy it is to script VirtualBox using Python). Using the VirtualBox GUI to manually merge lots of snapshots is time consuming and fiddly so I wrote a Python script called vboxmerge.py to do this automatically. ![]()
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