Improved storage of persisted files

When using a virtual development environment it’s important to be able to rebuild it with the minimum of effort so you can perform software updates or just repair your environment.

When rebuilding your environment you want to keep your workspace and certain other user specific files; this enables you to resume working without having to clone all your project repositories again and perform user specific setup after each rebuild.

To make the persistence of these files as robust as possible, this project has changed from storing persistent copies of files on the host filesystem using VirtualBox shared folders, to storing persistent copies of files in a separate virtual disk using the vagrant-persistent-storage plugin.

To upgrade to the new storage mechanism update the development environment to the latest version, rebuild the VM, and run the following command to copy the files from the old storage location:

rsync --recursive --times --chmod=Du=rwx,Dgo=rx,Fu=rw,Fgo=r --verbose \
    /vagrant/home/* /home/vagrant