Where Does Whonix Store VM Images?
Whonix Gateway and Workstation live as VM images: VirtualBox folders or KVM qcow2 files, depending on setup.
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Whonix ships as two virtual machines: a Gateway routing Tor traffic and a Workstation for activity. VirtualBox builds keep .vdi files plus snapshots under VirtualBox VMs folders. KVM builds use qcow2 images in the libvirt session or system image paths.
Sparse images punish naive copies by ballooning to full size. Use sparse-aware copy flags and shut guests down first; snapshots travel with their parent folders or not at all.
Where Whonix stores this, by platform
~/.local/share/images (Whonix qcow2, session libvirt)
Gateway plus Workstation qcow2 files (sparse; copy with sparse flags). XML definitions reference these paths; move images and redefine together.
%USERPROFILE%\VirtualBox VMs
Per-VM folders with .vdi disks plus Snapshots subfolders. Back up Gateway and Workstation together with both shut down.
Frequently asked questions
How do I back up Whonix VMs?
Copy both VM folders (Gateway plus Workstation with snapshots) with the VMs shut down. Sparse qcow2 copies need sparse-aware flags to stay small.
How do I move Whonix images to another drive?
Move the images to the new location, then redefine the VM XMLs to match. Session versus system libvirt paths decide the exact target folder.
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