Oct
14
2010
VirtualBox tip: Restore vs Delete Snapshot
Restore snapshot will restore to the state of the snapshot you select. That makes sense.
Delete snapshot does NOT make sense. Delete snapshot MERGES the snapshot to its parent shapshot. (It IS deleted in that it is no longer needed and therefore removed but it really should have been called Merge Snapshot.)
I agree but they derive their terminology from a higher level concept.
As analogy, if I have a series of snapshots of myself (think grade school portraits) and delete one, that does not change any follow up snapshots nor my current image. To achieve that effect, of course, they have to merge because the snapshots don’t store an entire image but only a difference.
What I often want to do is to drop a whole line of snapshots (and current state if its on that line), including the differencing disks. The only way I’ve seen so far is really convoluted. Does anybody have a better way?
http://srackham.wordpress.com/2010/06/18/deleting-virtualbox-snapshots/