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Is it possible to "share" a VirtualBox snapshot? I have a "baseline" VirtualBox machine, and I would like to be able to take a snapshot, and send it to another user which has the same baseline machine.

The scenario is that the baseline machine is used for testing, and I want to allow testers to create snapshots which describe a certain system state, and send that snapshot to developers to further examination.

EDIT: To clarify, I would like to be able to export snapshots "incrementally" without having to export the entire machine as an appliance.

JesperE
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5 Answers5

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Yes you can. I send vbox snapshots between a laptop and desktop frequently. First you make the snapshot current and then export the entire VM as an appliance.

rogerdpack
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hotei
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It should be possible to just send the ".vmdk" and ".sav" files that you can find in the Snapshots folder.

However, just copying these files will not make it appear in the VirtualBox GUI. For that, you will also need to edit the ".vbox" file that has all the information about which virtual harddrives belong to which VM's and so on.

Instead of editing your ".vbox" file, the easiest solution would probably be to copy the whole Virtual Machine folder except the really big ".vmdk" file that represents the baseline virtual harddrive. And then plug in this file that you have locally on your machine, anyway.

Jan Rüegg
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Even Exporting the whole appliance in *.OVA file will not save your snapshots tree, You will et the whole disk overlayed with the latest snapshot the machine was using before exporting.

Montaro
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I don't know if you can easily do that with VirtualBox snapshots, but if you happen to use ZFS as a storage filesystem for your virtual disks, ZFS allows sending incremental snapshots.

jlliagre
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Appears that with "today's" virtualbox, you can basically just zip up the virtual machine's folder (save it first I guess), then unpack it on another machine, double click on the ".vbox" file and it imports the machine right in, snapshots and all (you may need to remove the VboxAdditions virtual cd image first).

An older option was to use cloning: http://www.i-m-code.com/blog/blog/2012/02/04/virtualbox-clone-snapshots

rogerdpack
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