The problem is, if you delete a file, it don't get really deleted. It is just marked as deleted, so VirtualBox has to store the deleted file since it does not know if that data is just junk or not. There are several utilities for the different filesystems. E.g. Zerofree for ext2/3, sdelete for NTFS, ... . They really delete the deleted files, so VirtualBox can compress the VDI much better.
> On Thursday 28 February 2008 at 9:36 am, Flavio Vinicius penned > about "Re: [vbox-users] Size of VDI files" > > > The VBoxManage modifyvdi compact feature did not alter in any way > > the size of the vdi file. I believe that the problem is of data > > remanence like Michael pointed out. > > > > Maybe a clean up of the residual data from inside the VM and > > afterwards a compact might do the trick. The problem is that I do > > not know any way of cleaning up residual data. If anyone knows any > > tools to do such, please help. > > > > Hi Flavio, > > When I've done similar, I didn't reap huge amounts of blocks back. > Perhaps 10MB or so. > > When I want to keep a dynamic VDI small, I use `TweakUI' to place my > temporary directory on a network drive which points back to my Host > O/S. :) This way my VM doesn't need to grow. > > Cheers, _______________________________________________ vbox-users mailing list [email protected] http://vbox.innotek.de/mailman/listinfo/vbox-users
