[feature-request] Please develop compressed *.vdi images, like Qemu Qcow.

[Technologov]

hi all !

Qemu emulator has a very nice format for Virtual Hard Disk images - they are both dynamically expanding + they are RW compressed in real-time. This can save a LOT of hard disk space for users with many VMs.

So please either develop your own format with compression, or simply use Qemu Qcow format "as-is", by porting their code over here.

-Alexey Eremenko

[Achim Hasenmueller]

This is something we don't want to do. There are means to compress/encrypt volumes/directories on the host file system and it doesn't make sense to implement the same feature on different levels of the software stack.

[KhaoticMind]

While i agree that this can be done at other levels of the software stack, I must say it'd be good to see this feature enabled on VBox itself, since you can, for example, move the machine between different OSs, that doesn't support the same compression/encryption scheme (Windows NTFS and Linux, for example).

In my case i'd like to keep a image on my pendrive (so ti should be as small as possible), that i could carry it between work and home. And, at home, between Windows and Linux. And the fact that i could do it without leaving VBox would be very good.

So yeah, I think this is a important/interesting feature.

[Technologov]

Other idea is DVD backup: Currently I make and backup dozens of VMs on DVD.

To make sure that size is small I have to use zip program.

It would be much easier if I had this feature "built-in" optionally, like Qemu.

[Sander van Leeuwen]

There are two places where compression can be done: host and guest. If you don't like the host option, then you can still enble file system compression in your guest.