Use Shared Folders in VirtualBox

Things on this page are fragmentary and immature notes/thoughts of the author. Please read with your own judgement!

1. Do NOT check any of the following options unless you know what you are doing.

   • Read-only

     • You won’t be able to write to the share directory.

   • Auto-mount

     • Auto-mount uses the root account by default.

     • Not sure whether it uses the user account if a root account is not created in the VM.

   Do check the following option(s).

   • Make Machine-permanent

     • The shared folder will survive VM reboots.

   • Make Global

     • The shared folder will be available to all VMs even after reboots.

   

2. It is suggested that you mount a shared folder manually.

    sudo mount -t vboxsf -o uid=$(id -u),gid=$(id -u),fmask=177,dmask=077 \
        name_of_shared_folder mount_point

3. As alternatives to shared folders, you can

   • SSH into the host machine

   • use sshfs

   • start JupyterLab, VSCode Servers on the host and work in the guest VM