Merge VirtualBox Snapshots via Bash Script

Use case

My backup script automatically creates daily snapshots of each VM images (for incremental backups). Thus I have a huge amount of snapshots after a while. Unfortunately the VirtualBox-UI does not provide a method of removing/mergin all snapshots at once.

Solution

So I wrote a small script that is doing this job for me (and configured it via cronjob to be run once a week).
The code must be executed as sudo.

# Hello World
echo '========================================'
echo '= THIS SCRIPT COMES WITH NO WARRANTY   ='
echo '= Bash version '${BASH_VERSION}'       ='
echo '= [CTRL] + [Z] to kill process         ='
echo '========================================'

# Exit with message and error code
function failure() {	
	echo ''
	echo 'ERROR:'$1
	echo ''
	exit 1
}

# Check whether this script got called as super user. If not, we can not 
# proceed.
if [ "$(whoami)" != "root" ]; then
	failure 'Aborting: You must be root to execute this script.'
fi
  
# Get all users
declare -a users 	
tmp_users="$( getent passwd | grep /home/ | cut -d ':' -f 1 )"
for u in ${tmp_users}; do
	tmp_dir="/home/${u}"
	if [ -d "$tmp_dir" ]; then
		users+=(${u})
	fi
done	

# Do delete/merge all snapshots
for ((i=0;i<${#users[@]};i++)); do

	echo "> Processing user: ${users[i]}"

	# Get all installed VMs
	vms=$(su -c "VBoxManage list vms | sed -E 's/^\"(.*)\".*/\1/g'" -s /bin/sh ${users[i]})

	# Create new snapshot of each
	for vm_name in $vms; do 
		
		echo "> > Processing VM ${vm_name}.."

		# Loop through each snapshot and delete/merge it
		snapshots=$(su -c "VBoxManage showvminfo ${vm_name} --machinereadable | grep SnapshotName | cut -d '\"' -f2" -s /bin/sh ${users[i]})
		for snapshot_name in $snapshots; do 
			echo "> > > Merging snapshot: ${snapshot_name}.."
			snapshots=$(su -c "VBoxManage snapshot ${vm_name} delete ${snapshot_name}" -s /bin/sh ${users[i]})
		done
	done
	
done

Conclusion

The script tries to remove all snapshots of all images of all users.
In VirtualBox terms “removing an snapshot” actually means that they get merged into the main virtual file – without any loss of data.

 

Tagged with: , ,
Posted in Ubuntu, VirtualBox
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