If you don't have the original guest, or care to unregister the original guest, and your guest folder was in the usual Virtualbox format (the guest. If you still have the bunged-up original, you just copy the files back over the original, don't re-register the guest, just start it up. Restoring a copy-style backup is as simple as just re-copying the files back to the original place they were. (*see Moving a VM and re-interpret it as "Backing Up a VM") And you can also file-compare the restore to confirm it's a good restore. I'll just add that copying*, being a bit-for-bit copy, you can do a file compare on the copied files to confirm that the backup is an exact error-free copy and thus a true backup. Socratis has given a very comprehensive list there of the differences between the methods. Also quick and dirty let's-try-this feature. Now, once I'm happy with the changes, I merge them in my base and continue with my one, minimal, "empty" snapshot. If it doesn't work I revert and start searching for a solution. Or a new Service_Pack/OSX_Update/Linux_kernel comes out and I want to test it. I test the guests and if they don't work or something breaks, I revert to the snapshot. Then say a new VirtualBox version comes out. Finally, snapshots, I live a breathe by, but with ONLY ONE SNAPSHOT.Usually I pick a guest that is small in size (like FreeDOS), because it makes it faster. Cloning if I want to quickly test a feature for which I don't care about, like having two virtual screens on two monitors or see if the mini toolbar looks ugly if it's on the top, or mostly for helping other users, and I don't want to mess with the original.You have to unregister (and maybe delete?) the original and then register and run the copy. Now, since the UUIDs (and everything else) is the same as the original, if you try to register and run the copy in VirtualBox, you'll get a big, fat failure. Correct thinking about copying the whole folder and not just the VDIs. Copying: This is a true backup of the guest and the only one qualifying as such.The difference between the two tests is that with snapshots you can choose to keep the changes by merging the snapshot. A lot of people use cloning for those purposes as well. Of course people get carried away and think that it's a backup, and they take snapshot, after snapshot, after snapshot, ending in a big messy pile of snapshots (I think 174 was the max I've ever seen). Take a snapshot, test it, revert to snapshot. You take a snapshot for example right before you attempt something that might "destroy" your guest. Snapshots: They are really a point in time.And if there's one thing that VirtualBox hates is identical UUIDs. The reason they change? So that you can run the original and the clone in VirtualBox. If the OS you're cloning depends on one of these features (Windows for activation, GRUB for booting, etc.) then you might have problems down the road.
LINUX MAC OS X CLONE MAC
By really close I mean identical on the surface, but under the hood the UUIDs of the HDs and the VM change, the MAC addresses of the network cards change. Cloning: Create a "really close" to the original copy.With that in mind, here's a summary of what each feature does: First of all, out of the three solutions you proposed, only one is a backup copying the whole folder someplace else.