10 VirtualBox Tricks and Advanced Features You Should Know About

VirtualBox is packed with features that you may have never used, even if you frequently use it to run virtual machines. VMware keeps many of its best features to its paid versions, but all of VirtualBox’s features are completely free.

Many of the features here require Guest Additions installed in your virtual machine. This is good to do anyway, as installing the Guest Additions package will speed up your virtual machines.

VirtualBox can create snapshots that save a virtual machine’s state. You can revert to the saved state at any time by restoring a snapshot. Snapshots are similar to leaving a virtual machine in a saved state, but you can have multiple saved states and restore from them at any time.

To create a snapshot, click the Machine menu while the virtual machine is running and select Take snapshot or use the Snapshots panel. You can restore snapshots from this interface later.

Snapshots are particularly useful if you want to do something to a virtual machine and then erase your changes. For example, if you use a virtual machine to test software, you can create a snapshot of a clean Windows system, then install the software and play with it. When you’re done, you can restore the original snapshot and all traces of the software will be erased. You don’t have to reinstall your guest operating system or manually back up and restore a virtual machine’s files.