Setting up virtual machine to recover from malware

Question

I'm running two virtual machines with Windows 7 (host OS Mac) using Virtualbox which I'd like to use to analyze malware. I have configured Visual Studio debugging and WinDBG, as well as other tools.

What's the best way to save a backup of the victim machine to quickly recover from damage caused by malware? Should I make a .zip of the entire Virtualbox folder and store it elsewhere?

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Additional question: is it safe to run malware on a virtual machine with bridged adapter network settings for VS remote debugging?

Answer 1

To save and restore your VM's state, use snapshots: http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01.html#snapshots

With snapshots, you can save a particular state of a virtual machine for later use. At any later time, you can revert to that state, even though you may have changed the VM considerably since then. A snapshot of a virtual machine is thus similar to a machine in "saved" state, as described above, but there can be many of them, and these saved states are preserved.

Please create a separate Stack Exchange question for your second question.