<p>I'm getting pretty tired of my development box dying and then I end up having to reinstall a laundry list of tools that I use in development.  </p>

<p>This time I think I'm going to set the development environment up on a Virtual Box VM and save it to an external HDD so that way I can bring the development environment back up quickly after I fix the real computer.  </p>

<p>It seems to be like a good way to make a "hardware agnostic backup" and be able to get back up to speed quickly after a disaster.</p>

<p>Has anybody tried this?  How well did it work?  Did it save you time?</p>

I've done this with good success, we had this in our QA environment even and we'd also make use of Undo disks, so that if we want to test for example Microsoft patches we could roll the box back to it's previous state.
The only case we had issues was on SQL Server's particullary if you do a lot of disk activity. We had two VM's replicating gigs of data btw each other hosted on the same physical box. The disks just couldn't keep up; however, for all the other tiers it worked like a breeze.