Few words about VirtualBox

VirtualBox is an open source virtualization product for home and enterprise use. It gives you the power to work on some other OS than you’re running (Windows, Linux, Macintosh and Solaris as hosts), and it supports a great number of guest operating systems.

How to clone?

Let’s suppose you setup you guest OS, installed some applications, made updates, and now you wish to backup it if something goes wrong. The easiest solution will be to find directory where is your vdi file and copy it somewhere as backup, but that isn’t the good solution. You have to clone it!

There are few solutions how to do it, this one is when the host is a Windows OS. Run command prompt and enter the directory where is your VirtualBox applications installed (usually program files) and than execute a command.

C:\Program Files\Sun\VirtualBox>VBoxManager.exe clonevdi "source" "destination"

Suppose your vdi image is located on D: drive under directory VBox and named ubuntu910 and you want to make a vdi image clone named bckup_ubuntu910 on D: drive. That will look like this:

C:\Program Files\Sun\VirtualBox>VBoxManager.exe clonevdi "d:/VBox/ubuntu910.vdi" "d:/bckup_ubuntu910.vdi"

After execution of command you’ll see a percentage number of cloning status in command prompt, when it reaches 100% your vdi clone is ready. Clone has got new UUID (Universal Unique Identifier), so there will be no conflict if you decide to use both (original and the cloned one).