Manual section 5>Differencing images>1 Snapshots>C thrown away needs clarification

[Mark Cranness]

The manual says this about Restore Snapshot:

The differencing images holding all the write operations since the snapshot was taken are thrown away, and the original parent images are made active again. (If you restored the "root" snapshot, then this will be the root disk images; otherwise, some other differencing image descended from it.) This effectively restores the old machine state.

This is true when deleting the 'Current' snapshot, namely the bolded immediate parent of the 'Current State'.

However, this is ambigious and unclear when deleting any other snapshot, because the term 'the snapshot' is ambigious. The user might think that the snapshot refers to the snapshot being restored (it does not) and that the entire child tree under it will be thrown away (it will not).

Instead, how about:

The differencing images associated with the current machine state are thrown away, and...

[Mark Cranness]

Sorry: This is true when deleting the 'Current' snapshot, namely the bolded immediate parent of the 'Current State'.

This is true when Restoring the 'Current' snapshot, namely the bolded immediate parent of the 'Current State'.

[umoeller]

Thanks for the remark. It's hard to be accurate and easy to understand at the same time... the "differencing images" had to be in plural because there's one for each hard disk attachment. I'll come up with a better wording.

[umoeller]

I now have: "For each disk image attached to the machine, the differencing image holding all the write operations since the current snapshot was taken is thrown away, and the original parent image is made active again. (If you restored the "root" snapshot, then this will be the root disk image for each attachment; otherwise, some other differencing image descended from it.) This effectively restores the old machine state."

I hope that makes it better, otherwise please reopen!