VirtualBox Upgrade - Safe?

**fishman78** · January 28th, 2009

Hi All,

I got a message saying I should upgrade my Vbox yesterday. I would like to upgrade as I would like to give Windows 7 a try. My question is, should I backup my virtual drive or will it upgrade without changing my current guest? If I should back it up, how would I go about doing that. I heard just backing up the .vdi is a no go. Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks!

fishman78

**RomeReactor** · January 28th, 2009

Hi. You shouldn't have any problem upgrading. I updated a half hour ago and it's running OpenSolaris 2008.11 flawlessly.

**HotShotDJ** · January 28th, 2009

Originally Posted by fishman78

My question is, should I backup my virtual drive or will it upgrade without changing my current guest?

It is always a very good idea to backup your data before upgrading. You can back up your VirtualBox directory using the following:

Code:

mkdir ~/Backup && cp -a ~/.VirtualBox ~/Backup

You can find the backup of your VirtualBox settings and VDI in ~/Backup/.VirtualBox. If you want to back up to another location, leave off the "mkdir ~/Backup &&" part and replace "~/Backup" with full path to your preferred location, for example "/media/disk" or where ever you like.

Having said that, I've never actually NEEDED my backups after upgrading. I HAVE needed them after doing very STUPID things to my guest OS.

**dmizer** · January 29th, 2009

Moved this to the virtualization section. Thanks

**Dedoimedo** · January 29th, 2009

Backing up is always a good idea.

That said, I did an upgrade about a week ago or so and things went smoothly. This with the puel version of VB on Ubuntu 8.10, 32-bit.

Dedoimedo