VirtualBox VMs and Disk Space

trellis
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So right now I have 31 machines in my VirtualBox VMs folder, and that comes to ~101.5GB!

Does anyone here have any strategy around handling this?

Do you just destroy old machines projects and build it back up later when required?

There’s absolutely some old machines in there I haven’t touched for a long time but I’m a bit of an archivist…

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Yarp

Post must be 20

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I generally destroy machines if I run out of space or don’t need them. It’s trivial to make a DB backup with WP-CLI, and if you’re using Trellis right that’s the only part of a VM you stand to lose when you destroy it.

2 Likes
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Aware i’m digging up an old thread here, but just wondered if there are any other thoughts on this? I’m running out of disk space mainly due to the amount of VM’s I have so I need to find a solution for this.

Destroying machines isn’t ideal because I regularly update the sites, and start locally so don’t want to have to build them all again that frequently. I guess I could stop maintaining local versions, and just update staging and production - and only re-build local when I’m actually developing on them. Is that what other people do?

Is there anyway to reduce the HDD space the VM’s take up? They’re all around 4GB, do they need to be that big?

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I have my VMs on an external drive. Here’s how. They’re relatively inexpensive these days.

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Thanks! Will have a look into this.