Comments on: How To: Properly Backup a VirtualBox Machine (.VDI)

By: How To: Install VirtualBox 3 on Fedora 12 [Tutorial] | Derek Hildreth's Blog

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 02:45:47 +0000

[...] How To: Properly Backup a VirtualBox Machine (.VDI) [...]

By: How To: Install VirtualBox on Fedora 11 [Tutorial] | Derek Hildreth's Blog

How To: Install VirtualBox on Fedora 11 [Tutorial] | Derek Hildreth's Blog — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 06:21:11 +0000

[...] How To: Properly Backup a VirtualBox Machine (.VDI) [...]

By: Thomas

Thomas — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 10:33:35 +0000

“Most people don’t realize that making a backup of a VirtualBox Machine (.vdi) is more complex than just copy/paste.”

And still many people don’t realize, that a VirtualBox Machine is not the same as a Virtual Disk Image (VDI), though in some cases it might give you the desired result when making a copy of a VDI. But it does not give you a full clone of the VM you want to copy but only a copy of the VDI, because a VM also has a history of snapshots and it’s virtual machine settings.

So the title is totally misleading.

By: SendDerek

SendDerek — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:33:31 +0000

It is possible. I don’t know exactly off the top of my head.

You’ll want to take a look into setting up a script to run the proper VDI backup command and then throw a cron job together to run that script for you. You can choose if you want to do this everyday, once a week, or whenever.

By: PCNetSpec

PCNetSpec — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:20:12 +0000

Is it posible to automate the restore of a .vdi, overwriting the current one thus putting the VM back to the state it was in previously?

To clarify…once a week I want a linux system to automatically restore an XP .vdi…overwriting the existing one, without user intervention.

Possible?

Many thanks in advance.

By: Dave Abrahams

Dave Abrahams — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 20:29:12 +0000

Seems to me you’ve got bigger problems than UUID collisions (a fixable problem) if you are doing things this way: any potential incrementalism in your backup system is probably lost because a .VDI is one big file… right?

By: stupid setup

stupid setup — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 19:28:26 +0000

why aren’t the xml and other settings stored where you choose to save your .vdi image! .. ended up backing up the .vdi images.. not knowing some retard decided that storing extra file details etc in a completely different location would then still be required to get the .vdi image working properly again within virtualbox..

who designs stuff like that!.. oh and to export out as a backup.. into a different format.. great so just waste some hdd space when I could easily just use the existing .vdi images..

anyway screw it just changed the uid numbers of a new vm setup and my old vdi images worked.

By: Harish

Harish — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 14:54:15 +0000

P.S: Make sure you release the vdi image this time before you use the command that I mentioned above.

Cheers,
Harish

By: Harish

Harish — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 14:52:14 +0000

Hi Stephan,

You can fix this error by using the following command on your terminal.

VBoxManage internalcommands setvdiuuid /path/to/virtualdisk.vdi

On your terminal, it would look something like this.
————————————————————
harish@harish-laptop:~$ VBoxManage internalcommands setvdiuuid /path/to/virtualdisk.vdi
VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 2.2.2
(C) 2005-2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All rights reserved.

UUID changed to: 9e89fe14-d010-469e-a737-cd65218c4acb
————————————————————

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Harish

By: Stephan Wehner

Stephan Wehner — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 01:57:27 +0000

I see the explanations at

http://www.my-guides.net/en/content/view/155/26/

now — they say to “release” the hard drive before cloning.

Looks like some strange design to me. Surely a physical hardware can be popped in and out without UUID registration problems?

Stephan