Syncing or version controlling virtualbox VMs

Question

I recently set up a handy Arch Linux development environment inside a VirtualBox VM on Windows 7.

How can I keep this development environment in version control so I can simply "check out" the environment itself on a new computer?

What VirtualBox files do I need in version control besides the .vdi file?

How can I use rsync to keep two VMs in sync?

I'm not interested in backing up the VM once by hand, exporting an "appliance," or fiddling with a GUI to achieve this; the syncing/versioning process must be completely scriptable.

Answer 1

Try using git-annex & bup.

bup does the rsync thing.

git-annex relaxes the git 'duplicate the lot' requirement; so you could have your entire VirtualBox data distributed across multiple storage media, and have configurable per-file data redundancy.

Both are scriptable. No more snapshot woes.

This link has further details about git, git-annex and bup.

What VirtualBox files do I need in version control besides the .vdi file?

I am using a *pre-oracle version of VirtualBox. For my antique version: in addition to the vdi files, I also maintain all the vbox config files; so that's all the xml under the /machine/ directory & also the main VirtualBox.xml file.