Restoring VirtualBox snapshots after a copy (not a clone) of the VM and removal of the original VM

Question

I have [edit: every] idea why I'm in this situation but let me explain.

I copied my VM files I was working on with its snapshots somewhere else and accidentally removed the VM from VirtualBox. Note that I just cmd-c cmd-v the folder and did not us the VBox gui to do a proper clone

I have a folder now like so:

- xyz.vdi
- Snapshots
--{a}.vdi
--{b}.vdi

{b}.vdi seems to be my most recent snapshot

Is there any way I can recover a baseline xyz.vdi which has merged in it {b}.vdi?

Or at minimum a way to restore my VM

I searched all over stackoverflow and found this solution https://www.treshna.com/rebuilding-virtualbox-with-missing-vdi-snapshots/

It only throws a number of errors:

ROSUbuntu1604>VBoxManage clonehd Snapshots/\{ca53e697-c469-43a8-852e-a8173ce45384\}.vdi  ROSUbuntu1604.vdi
VBoxManage: error: Parent medium with UUID {8a8b278b-db55-4b30-8e00-6460c858b0c2} of the medium 'ROSUbuntu1604/Snapshots/{ca53e697-c469-43a8-852e-a8173ce45384}.vdi' is not found in the media registry ('/Library/VirtualBox/VirtualBox.xml')
VBoxManage: error: Details: code NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005), component MediumWrap, interface IMedium, callee nsISupports
VBoxManage: error: Context: "OpenMedium(Bstr(pszFilenameOrUuid).raw(), enmDevType, enmAccessMode, fForceNewUuidOnOpen, pMedium.asOutParam())" at line 179 of file VBoxManageDisk.cpp

Is there any other tool besides VBoxManage clonehd that can merge snapshots without an "explicit" attribute in the VirtualBox.xml?

Any thoughts are appreciated! I have a lot of data in the snapshot and learnt a lesson to always merge my snapshots periodically with the base image :-(

KC1200 KC1200 · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-13T17:04:26

Saved by this post: https://superuser.com/questions/437767/how-to-merge-arbitrary-snapshot-into-base-vdi-in-virtualbox

I'm not sure everything went exactly as described in above post

All I did was

VBoxManage clonehd ROSUbuntu1604.vdi ROSUbuntu1604-full.vdi
VBoxManage clonehd Snapshots/\{8a8b278b-db55-4b30-8e00-6460c858b0c2\}.vdi ROSUbuntu1604-full.vdi -existing
VBoxManage clonehd Snapshots/\{8a8b278b-db55-4b30-8e00-6460c858b0c2\}.vdi ROSUbuntu1604-full.vdi --existing

And that worked! Its strange because I did not have to remap the UUID of ROSUbuntu1604.vdi based on the instructions. Was it because I had a VM in VirtualBox pointing to this .vdi. Anyways it goes to show that you can merge .vdi files even if copied and not cloned from Virtualbox.

Restoring VirtualBox snapshots after a copy (not a clone) of the VM and removal of the original VM

1 Answers