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Automated Snapshots with VirtualBox

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ewemoa:
Those hard to reproduce bugs...sometimes we reproduce them, but then subsequently don't seem to be able to...

Perhaps we'd have a better chance if we could start from a snapshot of a virtual machine which was taken shortly before a successful reproduction -- may be also having frequent screenshots of the system.

So with disk space being on the cheaper side these days, may be automatically taking snapshots of one's system every X minutes would be practical (can delete stuff that older than some time for keeping the amount of used space manageable).

May be this wouldn't work so well for certain situations -- e.g. some involving a network.  But FWIW, it looks somewhat doable using VirtualBox's vboxmanage (host) and vboxcontrol (guest via guest additions) command line tools.

One way to do this would be to leverage the guestproperty (get, set, wait) and snapshot subcommands.

Has anyone seen anything that does this sort of thing already?

Ath:
You'd probably have a look at VBoxManage: http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch08.html

ewemoa:
Err...

May be this wouldn't work so well for certain situations -- e.g. some involving a network.  But FWIW, it looks somewhat doable using VirtualBox's vboxmanage (host) and vboxcontrol (guest via guest additions) command line tools.
-ewemoa (June 04, 2011, 01:59 AM)
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Sorry I didn't get the capitalization correct...

Ath:
Sorry I didn't get the capitalization correct...
-ewemoa (June 04, 2011, 08:07 AM)
--- End quote ---
Sorry I didn't get the content of your post in my head correctly (must have been reading backward :-[)

Ath:
Would this help in some way? http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Aug-28.html

Haven't seen any tooling that handles that, so far.
I'd go for a scheduler and a few scripts, just a few lines either in Windows or Linux scripting, and both have a decent scheduler.
Creating snapshots to often could put such a drain on the disksystem, that it influences the performance or behavior of the virtual system, so some experimenting would be needed.

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