For example you could list the snapshots like this: # qemu-img snapshot -l /var/lib/libvirt/qemu/centos7-server.qcow2 You can list and interact with these disk snapshots (list, revert, create, delete) using the qemu-img command. (A more in-depth explanation of the qcow2 fileformat and how snapshots work can be found here. and then change your command line to use the qcow2 file rather than the old raw image. qemu-img convert -f raw -O qcow2 your-disk.img your-disk.qcow2. If you have a different format like a raw disk, you can convert it with qemu-img: 1. This means that the image and the snapshots are both within the qcow2 file. To use savevm snapshots youвЂ™ll need to be using a disk image format which supports them, like QCOW2. On other Copy-on-write filesystems like btrfs this means that the files are not changed in place but rather when modified a copy of them with the changes will be stored somewhere else on the disk.ДЇor qcow2 snapshots, the image is always modified in place but if a snapshot has been created, then within that qcow2 file whenever a file is modified after the snapshot, a copy before the modification is applied will be saved for the snapshot. You expected a disk image to be created but with qcow2 files it works a bit differently. qemu-img info vdisk1.img image: vdisk1.img file format: qcow2 virtual size: 150 GiB (161061273600 bytes) disk size: 28.5 GiB clustersize: 65536 Snapshot list: ID TAG VM SIZE DATE VM CLOCK 1 InitSnap 0 B 14:11:58 00:00:00.000 2 ExtraInstallDone 0 B 16:42:55 00:00:00.000 Format specific information: compat: 1.1 lazy. Now on the disks section you can see which disk devices where actually snapshot. This is occasionally because one of them is blind, and less frequently because one of them is hallucinating. this allows you to go back to the exact setup you had back when the snapshot was taken. Sometimes virsh and qemu see different things. Writing to a disk image from two processes may break it. intelligent on QEMUs side and save snapshots each time we hit an event. (Internal) snapshots taken with qemu-img while the VM is running. Certain workloads, however, do require you to stop of the VM before it is snapshotted. The KVM guests, at least, work fine with live snapshots. For example if after the snapshot you changed some device, memory size, etc. QEMU can quite easily snapshot the entire VM state so I was looking to see what. This feature is also known as live snapshot and it is quite valuable since it allows you to take a snapshot of your VM without any downtime. It's the configuration of your device, CPU, memory, etc.

This domain definition amounts to the same info you will get with virsh dumpxml your-domain. This file records the name of the snapshot, state of the domain when it was created, creation time, if memory was snapshot as well, and the disks, then the domain definition at that point as well. The xml files represents the snapshot metadata, if you open it you will see something like this (domain definition shortened for brevity):

Qemu snapshot