I've started using Windows 7 under VirtualBox on an Ubuntu 10.10 host. I took about 6 snapshots over the course of setting up the VM from the Windows restore image that came with the computer. My installations were more or less limited to windows updates, antivirus, and the VB Guest Additions. I uninstalled much more than I installed. The VM was running for about 24 hours total.

The snapshots increased in size at a worrisome rate, even when the machine was idle: the snapshot .vdi file for the period between 11:22 PM and 9:02 AM is 6 gigs in size; during that time very little happened. The other .vdi files are between 0.5 and 3 GB, most between 1 and 2 GB. The corresponding .sav files are between 0.5 and 1 GB.

The Internet connection where I was doing this is limited to 30KB/s download, which, constantly saturated, works out to less than 3 GB per 24 hour period.

Is this normal? Is there something that can be done to make snapshots more practical?

update

On starting up the VM again, I've noticed that mscorsvw is using significant processing time. Apparently this process [precompiles .NET assemblies]. This may have been going on during the period when I was taking snapshots, which might explain some of the snapshot size increase. I would be somewhat surprised to learn that this could be responsible for over 10 GB of additional disk usage, or that it would run for roughly 24 hours. Is this possible?