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Johannes Lemonde
Asked: 2017-12-30 05:41:19 +0800 CST

GNOME Boxes : move images to another hard drive

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I would like to find a way to have my GNOME Boxes images on another hard drive because my main partition has very limited storage.

I've just done some research and it seems that GNOME Boxes doesn't support choosing/moving the images of its virtual machines. According to this source, there are three places to take into account :

  • ~/.local/share/gnome-boxes/images
  • ~/.config/libvirt
  • ~/.config/gnome-boxes

My questions are : is it safe to replace those folders by symbolic links linking to another (external) hard drive ?

And what would happen if I try to launch GNOME Boxes with my hard drive unmounted ?

Do you have some suggestions or better ideas ? (Maybe mine is fine, I don't realise).

Thank you very much in advance !!

hard-drive

1 Answers

  1. I don't use Gnome Boxes; however, I have simlinked the prefix directory for WINE. It has no issues with the prefix folder being a simlink. My guess is it will work the same for you. For most applications simlinks are transparent.

    the config files shouldn't take much space so it is the image directory that needs attention.

    An alternative is to make partition that you mount to ~/.local/share/gnome-boxes/images. This partition can be automounted. If the drive is disconnected when you start Gnome boxes, then the VM will think it has no VMs.

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