Convert Virtualbox image to Hyper-V

Windows is a bit different, see How to migrate existing Windows installations to VirtualBox for a guide.

From memory you can use VMware's converter and VirtualBox will read VMDK files.

For Linux, if you want the easy solution, boot a live CD,

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/path/to/images/sda1.img bs=1024

Do that for every partition mounted in /etc/fstab of your machine, and then setup those images in VirtualBox.

Here is a bash script that I use. It can backup a running VM, but it shuts it down during the backup. You can then fire it up again. I don't think backing up a VM while it's running is possible.

The other caveat is that you need to manually merge any snapshots for this to work.

#!/bin/bash

#from `VBoxManage list vms |grep "^\(Name\|UUID\)"
VM=80e1cd84-0790-4c9f-a97e-97319c59431f

#from `VBoxManage list hdds |grep "^\(Location\|UUID\)"
HD=790acb86-703d-44e1-8f80-4e0229a2c054
VDI=WindowsXP.IE.vdi

# stop
VBoxManage controlvm $VM savestate

# backup (shrink happens automatically)
rm -f /home/chase/vms/backup/$VDI
VBoxManage clonehd $HD /home/chase/vms/backup/$VDI -remember