Move existing VirtualBox images

I ran out of disk space in my home directory because VirtualBox images were taking too much space. I wanted to move them to my data partition that has way more space, but I could not find a way to do this with the VirtualBox GUI.

However, while I found no documentation on the subject, it’s really easy to do by moving the images, and updating the VirtualBox configuration file accordingly:

mv /home/val/VirtualBox\ VMs/* /data/virtualbox

Then edit the VirtualBox configuration file, depending on the version and system, ~/.config/VirtualBox/VirtualBox.xml or ~/.VirtualBox/VirtualBox.xml, to replace the old path with the new path:

sed -i 's,/home/val/VirtualBox VMs,/data/virtualbox,' ~/.config/VirtualBox/VirtualBox.xml

Restart VirtualBox, and everything should work, but the images are now on the other partition!