How to locate backup file in Virtualbox VDI image

Installation
1

I hope this is the right place to post this.

My VirtualBox machine of Home Assistant has broken, and I made it worse while trying to fix it. I am trying to find the latest backup (which was done early this morning) so i can restore it on a working snapshot of the VM.

I went to restart HA, and it never came back up (~25mins, usually under 1). Checked the virtual machine instance and it was throwing a bunch of errors about lack of space. So I shut it down, and increased the VHDD space from 10Gb to 20gb. Now I get what looks like a POST window, then a cursor, that does nothing. So I loaded the VDI as a second disk on an Ubuntu VM, and can access the files. But I cannot find the .tar of the backups. Searching for “backup” or “*.tar” doesn’t return anything, so i’m a bit lost.

The most promising place seems to be a partition labeled hassos-data, but I have 4 others as well.

Am I even on the right path here? Is there an easier way?

Thanks in advance

2

I found what I needed. The backup files are in the “hassos-data” partition. I had multiple snapshots of the VM, and was mounting the wrong vdi, which was not showing me the latest backups. Once I did, I was able to retrieve the backup, and restore it.

Thanks!

3

Hello. Did you open the .img file on windows? Linux? How?

4

I broke my HA today but managed to retrieve the backup file from the corrupted VDI using the excellent free DiskInternals Linux Disk reader

Steps I followed are here: How to access my backup from Autoboot- VM - #12 by geoffreycoan