Derek Hildreth’s Blog

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

Most people don’t realize that making a backup of a VirtualBox Machine (.vdi) is more complex than just copy/paste. If you do that, you’ll soon realize (when it’s too late) that it doesn’t work! This is the proper way to backup your VirtualBox Machine:

VBoxManage clonevdi source destination

Example:
VBoxManage clonevdi ~/.VirtualBox/VDI/WindowsXP.vdi ~/WindowsXP_Backup.vdi

Then, wait for it to complete. It may take a while depending on the size of your .vdi file (or how much space you allocated towards your virtual machine).

Tags: .vdi, backup, Linux, tutorial, virtualbox