root-cow.img.old

[Gecko]

What is the file root-cow.img.old?

which can be found in the directories /var/lib/qubes/vm-templates/*

Every directory has a root-cow.img and root-cow.img.old (backup I assume). Can I safely delete these .old files? As each one is 10GB+ (I don't have a huge HDD).

[Unman]

The answer is in the documentation:
www.qubes-os.org/doc/template-implementation

The *old files allow you to roll back any changes to the template.

Each file is *NOT* 10GB - if you check the actual size with 'ls -ls'
you'll see they are only taking a few MB on disk.

unman