VirtualBox

Opened 17 years ago

Closed 8 years ago

#597 closed enhancement (fixed)

Cannot take a snapshot when there is a Writethrough hard disk attached

Reported by: nvivo Owned by:
Component: other Version: VirtualBox 1.4.0
Keywords: Cc:
Guest type: other Host type: other

Description (last modified by aeichner)

Trying to take a snapshot of a VM that has a disk in writethrough mode (even if you have other regular disks) causes the GUI to show an error:

Cannot take a snapshot when there is a Writethrough hard disk attached ('/path/to/disk.vdi').

Result Code: 
0x80004005
Component: 
Machine
Interface: 
IMachine {31f7169f-14da-4c55-8cb6-a3665186e35e}
Callee: 
IConsole {1dea5c4b-0753-4193-b909-22330f64ec45}

This makes it hard to have a "system disk" that you want to snapshot and a "data disk" where you persist documents, settings and other stuff. The workaround today is to manually remove the disk from the VM using the settings window, take the snapshot, then re-add the disk. (And you must remember everytime you restore it).

In VMWare, using the "persistent disk" that is the writethrough equivalent, the behaviour is to take the snapshot of regular disks and ignore the persistent ones.

So, VBoxManage could have a similar behaviour, and maybe show a simple message like this when taking/restoring snapshots:

The following disks are beign ignored because they are in writethrough mode:

/path/to/disk1.vdi
/path/to/disk2.vdi

Change History (3)

comment:1 by Kevin Roth, 16 years ago

I was going to write this up as well, so consider this a Me Too. For me, I prefer to setup my Windows Paging File (in the Guest OS) on a separate WriteThrough VDI file. There's no need to include this in snapshots for me, since Windows doesn't really care what's in that file after it shuts down. But having to remove and re-add that pagefile disk is a real drag.

comment:2 by Fls'Zen, 15 years ago

Yes, this is a very nice feature that hasn't been implemented yet. See enhancement 2502 defect 2578 also. 2578 refers to the documentation that suggests the use of writethrough disks to exclude them from snapshots.

comment:3 by aeichner, 8 years ago

Description: modified (diff)
Resolution: fixed
Status: newclosed

Was probably fixed long ago, works for me.

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