device: 0.816 graphic: 0.723 performance: 0.635 other: 0.621 semantic: 0.577 network: 0.576 debug: 0.508 PID: 0.455 boot: 0.428 permissions: 0.417 socket: 0.331 vnc: 0.313 KVM: 0.087 files: 0.041 snapshot=on fails with non file-based storage The snapshot=on option doesn't work with an nbd block device: /usr/bin/qemu-system-x86_64 \ [...] -device virtio-scsi-pci,id=scsi \ -drive file=nbd:localhost:61930,snapshot=on,format=raw,id=hd0,if=none \ -device scsi-hd,drive=hd0 \ [...] gives the error: qemu-system-x86_64: -drive file=nbd:localhost:61930,snapshot=on,format=raw,id=hd0,if=none: could not open disk image nbd:localhost:61930: No such file or directory If you remove the snapshot=on flag, it works (although that of course means that the block device is writable which we don't want). Previously reported here: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.qemu/148390 and I can confirm this still happens in qemu 1.4.0. Triaging old bug tickets... I think this has likely been fixed in 2013 ... or can you still reproduce this issue with the latest version of QEMU? Could we close this ticket nowadays? Let's close this. libguestfs doesn't use snapshot=on any longer.