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I'm excessively using VirtualBox snapshots (for use in CI-builders), so typically I have a number of snapshots on a single VM. Often I find my self "forking" a new snapshot from an existing one, e.g. for updating the system:

base
└── A
    └── A1

Once the udpate completes, I replace the parent snapshot with its child, by simply removing A, VirtualBox will then merge the changeset base->A and A->A1:

base
└── A1

Cool.

However, sometimes I want to create a new snapshot subtree, that originally forks of some snapshot, and gets a life of its own:

E.g.

base
└── A
    ├── A1
    └── B
        └── B1

Now: this gets ugly pretty soon (as i keep updating the subtree), and eventually i like to clean up the snapshot tree, so it becomes:

base
├── A1
└── B1

Unfortunately, VirtualBox does not allow me to delete snapshot A with the following error:

Snapshot 'A' of the machine 'vagrantbox' cannot be deleted, because it has 2 child snapshots, which is more than the one snapshot allowed for deletion.

In theory I do not see any problems with deleting snapshot A: VirtualBox simply has to perform the snapshot merging twice (base->A->A1 and base->A->B). This will probably grow the snapshot size, but I can happily live with that (and hopefully i will get better performance by reducing the FS-layers)

So: how can I rebase a snapshot to a parent, while leaving sibling snapshots intact?

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You can make a full VM clone based on a snapshot. The new VM will not have any snapshots. The only other way is to de-register the VM, then do all the work yourself by using vboxmanage on the disk images and editing the VM's XML file.

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