Linux Snapshot Issue – How to Delete a Snapshot Not Seen with Virsh but Visible with Qemu-img Info

centos7kvm-virtualizationlinuxqemusnapshot

[msingh@centos images]$ qemu-img info IE11-Win7-VMWare-disk1.qcow2
image: IE11-Win7-VMWare-disk1.qcow2
file format: qcow2
virtual size: 40G (42949672960 bytes)
disk size: 82G
cluster_size: 65536
Snapshot list:
ID        TAG                 VM SIZE                DATE       VM CLOCK
2         freshInstall              0 2018-11-16 15:41:01   00:00:00.000
3         freshInstallActivated   3.5G 2018-11-17 02:50:15   00:06:45.305
4         90DayActivation           0 2018-11-17 09:06:41   00:00:00.000
Format specific information:
    compat: 1.1
    lazy refcounts: false

As seen above the snapshots are seen with ID 2,3,4 but i cannot see it with virsh command below.Also are these snapshots causing a big difference in the disk size and virtual size

[msingh@centos images]$ sudo virsh snapshot-list Windows7FreeIE11 
 Name                 Creation Time             State
------------------------------------------------------------

[msingh@centos images]$

This happened after i moved the IE11-Win7-VMWare-disk1.qcow2 image file to another file-system because of storage space limitation.

How can i delete the snapshots because virsh command does not work because it cannot find the snapshots listed by qemu-img.

[msingh@centos images]$ sudo virsh list --all
[sudo] password for msingh: 
 Id    Name                           State
----------------------------------------------------
 1     Windows7FreeIE11               running
 -     centos7.0                      shut off
 -     win10                          shut off

Best Answer

if you want only delete this file and have a root access in shell . so in linux ditros you can simply remove command line : rm -f my-image-file.qcow2

if you want to do something else please let me know to represent a better solution.

also you can delete this file with qemu-img command line if it works :

Use qemu-img snapshot -d snapshot_id disk_image to delete old or unneeded snapshots of a virtual machine. This saves some disk space inside the qcow2 disk image as the space occupied by the snapshot data is restored:

tux@venus:~> qemu-img snapshot -d 2 /images/sles11sp1.qcow2

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