1 First steps disk space. To delete a snapshot, right-click on it in the snapshots tree and select “Delete”. As of VirtualBox 3.2, snapshots can be deleted even while a machine is running. Note: Whereas taking and restoring snapshots are fairly quick operations, deleting a snapshot can take a considerable amount of time since large amounts of data may need to be copied between several disk image files. Temporary disk files may also need large amounts of disk space while the operation is in progress. There are some situations which cannot be handled while a VM is running, and you will get an appropriate message that you need to perform this snapshot deletion when the VM is shut down. 1.9.2 Snapshot contents Think of a snapshot as a point in time that you have preserved. More formally, a snapshot consists of three things: • It contains a complete copy of the VM settings, including the hardware configuration, so that when you restore a snapshot, the VM settings are restored as well. (For example, if you changed the hard disk configuration or the VM’s system settings, that change is undone when you restore the snapshot.) The copy of the settings is stored in the machine configuration, an XML text file, and thus occupies very little space. • The complete state of all the virtual disks attached to the machine is preserved. Going back to a snapshot means that all changes that had been made to the machine’s disks – file by file, bit by bit – will be undone as well. Files that were since created will disappear, files that were deleted will be restored, changes to files will be reverted. (Strictly speaking, this is only true for virtual hard disks in “normal” mode. As mentioned above, you can configure disks to behave differently with snapshots see chapter 5.4, Special image write modes, page 76. Even more formally and technically correct, it is not the virtual disk itself that is restored when a snapshot is restored. Instead, when a snapshot is taken, VirtualBox creates differencing images which contain only the changes since the snapshot were taken, and when the snapshot is restored, VirtualBox throws away that differencing image, thus going back to the previous state. This is both faster and uses less disk space. For the details, which can be complex, please see chapter 5.5, Differencing images, page 77.) Creating the differencing image as such does not occupy much space on the host disk initially, since the differencing image will initially be empty (and grow dynamically later with each write operation to the disk). The longer you use the machine after having created the snapshot, however, the more the differencing image will grow in size. • Finally, if you took a snapshot while the machine was running, the memory state of the machine is also saved in the snapshot (the same way the memory can be saved when you close the VM window). When you restore such a snapshot, execution resumes at exactly the point when the snapshot was taken. The memory state file can be as large as the memory size of the virtual machine and will therefore occupy quite some disk space as well. 25