VM Snapshot Manager Not Working

[VMJohn19]

Hi, hoping for some help here please.  I use VM for software and hardware testing and so only know enough to get by…

An image was created for me and I have created successive snap shots at key points, in case I needed to roll back to a version before any changes I make (in the vent of unexpected bahaviour). The snap shots were created before I booted the virtual machine, not while it is running - not sure if this is important.

I now need to roll back one snap shot.  When I do though, the system issues a warning about rolling back (as expected) and the ‘you are here’ flag goes to the relevant part that I have rolled back to.  Okay so far.  However when i boot the VM image, it is as if I am just carrying on from the latest snapshot. I tried deleting snap shots so that it is forced to go back, but this had the same result.  When I boot I still boot from the latest change I made.

What am i doing wrong please?

Any logs I can look through?

System Info:

VMware® Workstation 12 Pro

1. 12.5.1 build-4542065

Host OS: Windows 10, 64-bit  (Build 10586) 10.0.10586, 32G memory

The Guest is Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard 8 G

Thanks in advance.

John

[a_p_]

Welcome to the Community,

Deleting a Snapshot is likely not what you want to do, as this function doesn't actually delete a snapshot, but merges it's changes into its parent.

In case you want to go back you only have to select the snapshot to which state you want to revert, and hit the GoTo button. This will either discard all current changes, if it is the last snapshot in a chain, or create a fork (i.e. a Snapshot Tree) if you revert to an older snapshot in the chain.

If you still have issues, please post a screenshot of the Snapshot Manager, and the information to which snapshot you want to revert to. This will make it easier to help.

André

[VMJohn19]

Hi

Thanks for coming back.  Yes I found out deleting a snap shot did not help.  I was doing what you suggest, but it always loads up the last point I was at.  I can tell this by the contents of the desktop and the version of some of the files.  I checked the error log and I see this: -

2018-03-06T13:40:25.179Z|vmx| I125: FILE: FileDeletionRetry: Non-retriable error encountered (C:\VMware\D1PAVA\EBIR500FullGal_80e\01EBIR500SVRA.vmx~😞 The system cannot find the file specified (2)

I have also taken some screen grabs, 1 = before moving from latest snap shot to earlier

2 = earlier snap shot and 3 is to show that the contents on the desktop are unchanged – they should have gone back to late 2017!  It still shows a folder from Feb this year…

Screen grab 4 is the contents of the VM folder, where you can see the snap shot files.

Ay ideas please?/

Cheers

John

[VMJohn19]

Hi

I did some more digging on this.  Checked one of my other images - as this is the first time i have had to go back to an older snapshot.  It works fine on another images i have.

I noticed that the working image has multiple vmdk files (one for every snapshot), that are quite chunky in size.  Where as the one i am working on has a single 1k vmdk file.

Related or can snap shots work like this?

Thanks.

John

[a_p_]

The 1k .vmdk files is a descriptor file (a text file) which points to the actual data .vmdk file. Both files make up the virtual disk.

What I think is that the virtual disk in the "non-working" VM is set to "independent-persistent" in which case the virtual disk is excluded from snapshots, i.e. all the snapshots you have may only contain configuration changes to the VM itself.

In this case you may (after a backup) delete all snapshots from the Snapshot Manager, and then disable the independent mode for the virtual disk.After that you should see new .vmdk files after creating new snapshots.

To verify this, please take a look at the VM's vmware.log to see whether it shows .vmdk files other than the two in the VM's folder.

André

[VMJohn19]

Andre

Thanks for your help. You are correct.  It was the independence setting.  There were only two vmdk files.  So I copied the VM image, deleted the snapshots, changed the setting so that Independent was not set.  Took a few snap shots, made some changes, rolled back between them, checked for changes pre and post snap shots and it works fine.

However, I guess this means that I am now stuck with the image I have and I cannot roll back beyond where I am today.  A problem for me as there were some company updates that were applied to the image that I need to try another software on.

Just to confirm, there is no way to get back my old snapshots?  Just changes to VM right?

Thanks, John.

[a_p_]

Correct, at least there's no option from the VMware side, because all user data has been written to the base virtual disk.

In case you have backups of the VM (or the entire host) it may be an option to restore an older version.

André