8.32. VBoxManage clonemedium

Synopsis

Description

The VBoxManage clonemedium command enables you to clone an existing medium (virtual disk, DVD, or floppy), which is typically an image file. Only the Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) differs between the original image and the cloned image.

You can use the Virtual Media Manager to transfer the cloned image to another host system or reimport it into Oracle VM VirtualBox. See Section 5.3, “The Virtual Media Manager” and Section 5.6, “Cloning Disk Images”.

uuid | source-medium

Specifies the UUID or the absolute or relative file name of the source medium to clone. You can specify the UUID of the medium only if it is registered. Use the VBoxManage list hdds command to list registered images.

uuid | target-medium

Specifies the UUID or the absolute or relative file name of the target (clone) medium. You can specify the UUID of the target medium only if it is registered. Use the VBoxManage list hdds command to list registered images.

disk | dvd | floppy

Specifies the type of the medium to clone. Valid values are disk, dvd, and floppy. The default value is disk.

--existing

Performs the clone operation by overwriting an existing target medium. The result is that only the portion of the source medium that fits into the existing target medium is copied.

If the target medium is smaller than the source, only the portion of the source medium up to the size of the target medium is copied.

If the target medium is larger than the source, the remaining part of the target medium is unchanged.

--format

Specifies the file format of the target medium if it differs from the format of the source medium. Valid values are VDI, VMDK, VHD, RAW, and other.

--variant=Standard,Fixed,Split2G,Stream,ESX

Specifies the file format variant for the target medium, which is a comma-separated list of variants. Following are the valid values:

Standard is the default disk image type, which has a dynamically allocated file size.
Fixed uses a disk image that has a fixed file size.
Split2G indicates that the disk image is split into 2GB segments. This value is for VMDK only.
Stream optimizes the disk image for downloading. This value is for VMDK only.
ESX is used for some VMWare products. This value is for VMDK only.

Note that not all variant combinations are valid. Specifying incompatible variant values in the list will produce an error message.

Note

For compatibility with earlier versions of Oracle VM VirtualBox, you can use the clonevdi and clonehd commands instead of the clonemedium command.

Examples

The following command creates a clone of the disk01.vdi disk image file. The clone is called disk02.vdi.

$ VBoxManage clonemedium disk01.vdi disk02.vdi

The following command creates a clone of the disk01.vdi disk image file. The clone is in VMDK format and is called disk02.vmdk.

$ VBoxManage clonemedium disk01.vdi disk02.vmdk --format VMDK