Download Oracle VM VirtualBox User Manual

1 First steps
In any case, a window will pop up and ask you for a snapshot name. This
name is purely for reference purposes to help you remember the state of the
snapshot. For example, a useful name would be “Fresh installation from scratch,
no external drivers”. You can also add a longer text in the “Description” field if
you want.
Your new snapshot will then appear in the list of snapshots under the “Snapshots”
tab. Underneath, you will see an item called “Current state”, signifying that the
current state of your VM is a variation based on the snapshot you took earlier.
If you later take another snapshot, you will see that they will be displayed in
sequence, and each subsequent snapshot is a derivation of the earlier one:
VirtualBox allows you to take an unlimited number of snapshots – the only limitation is the size of your disks. Keep in mind that each snapshot stores the state
of the virtual machine and thus takes some disk space.
2. You can restore a snapshot by right-clicking on any snapshot you have taken in
the list of snapshots. By restoring a snapshot, you go back (or forward) in time:
the current state of the machine is lost, and the machine is restored to exactly
the same state as it was when then snapshot was taken.5
5 Both the terminology and the functionality of restoring snapshots has changed with VirtualBox 3.1.
Before
that version, it was only possible to go back to the very last snapshot taken – not earlier ones, and the
operation was called “Discard current state” instead of “Restore last snapshot”. The limitation has been
lifted with version 3.1. It is now possible to restore any snapshot, going backward and forward in time.
26