How can I backup and then restore a vagrant box?

[Tim Visher]

Hi Everyone,

We have a very lengthy and sadly brittle provisioning process. Making both of those better is on our roadmap but it unfortunately makes people very nervous about recreating their VMs which leads to other problems.

I had the idea that I could make a backup of the box prior to destroying it, then if anything goes wrong with the provision, you can always fall back to the backup.

I don't believe snapshotting can work here because we want to be able to destroy the box and then recreate it (maybe that's problem number 1?).

My initial idea was to do a `VBoxManage clonevm` step prior to destroying the box and then if anything goes wrong clone the vm back into place and allow you to continue on your way.

My first attempt at this did not go well though, and I'm unclear as to why. Vagrant recognized the machine as already provisioned, but the box itself definitely was not provisioned.

How can I do this? Or is there a better way to accomplish what I'm talking about.

Thanks in advance!

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In Christ,

Timmy V.

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http://five.sentenc.es/ -- Spend less time on mail

[Alvaro Miranda Aguilera]

Hello,

Vagrant uses Virtualbox uuid to identify boxes.

VBoxManage list vms

So, if you destroy, then will be some manual work.

I think the easiest way is to do a vagrant package , just be sure to delete /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rule or similar file, then shutdown.

Alvaro.

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[Tim Visher]

I had thought of that. One problem is that `vagrant package` took about 15 minutes to complete.

The other problem is that I'm unclear how I can 'restore' the results of `vagrant package`. My understanding of said command is that it prepares your box to be distributed, not be reused locally. Do you know how I could accomplish the later?