State/Powered off since ??

[jim.rather]

So this is not a bug, but I guess a "feature request". If I copy a VM between machines, usually via rsync, I notice that the State (if the VM was off would state "Powered off since..") listed in a vboxmanage showvminfo is from the local machine not the machine that I copied it from. Even if I have copied all of the files from the VMs folder from another machine.

However, if I have copied the files, yet remove the VM from VirtualBox (while choosing not to remove the files) and then add the VM back, it has the correct date/time of when it was powered off on the original machine.

So I am wondering if it got that information from the VM files that were copied, how can that information be locally updated to indicate that?

[Socratis]

I have an OSX system as my main one. I also have a Win7/10/10-64 PC, a 12 year old granpa, but still good enough to run most of my VMs. I also use it as one of my backups, so I copy the files (using rsync) from the OSX to Win.

The "VBoxManage showvminfo FreeDOS" (for example) doesn't care what the file stamp is. It has all the information in needs in the FreeDOS "recipe", aka the "FreeDOS.vbox" file.

If you open up any ".vbox" file, you'll see that in the 2nd line, the "Machine" definition, ends up with:

<Machine uuid="{822ab35a...} lastStateChange="2017-12-30T16:04:17Z">

The lastStateChange is the date that is displayed in the "VBoxManage showvminfo". As you can see from the last letter, it's UTC-based.

So, I'm not quite sure what you're seeing in your copy-to host. Why the discrepancy? How much of a discrepancy we're talking about?

[jim.rather]

In my case, the "vboxmanage showvminfo" does not appear to get that information from the .vbox file. The information in the field lastStateChange in .vbox does not match the info from "vboxmanage showinfo" if that file has been copied over. Likewise, the hover-over within the VirtualBox Manager shows the last time the local machine booted that VM, not the information contained within the copied over'd .vbox file.

For example, if I have a VM called win10 that I primarily run on system A but will also use on system B. Both A and B have this VM listed in their VirtualBox Managers. However, when I need to use win10 on B, I want it to the be latest version that ran on A, so I rsync the VM files from A to B.

However, even after I rsync the files, "vboxmanage showvminfo" on B shows the last time win10 ran on B and not information contained in the .vbox file. The last time win10 ran on B is also present in the hover-over on B.

Yes, I realize this isn't a problem and that if I remove/re-add the VM to B, it fixes the "discrepancy". Just trying to see if the "vboxmanage showvminfo" and hover-over information can be corrected or pulled from the .vbox file itself instead of from where it is currently getting that information? Otherwise I have to verify the information in the .vbox file itself in order to confirm that I have the latest VM.