How to share your computer files with a virtual machine in Oracle VM VirtualBox.

Welcome my dear readers, today am going to be writing on how to share your System files with a virtual machine that runs the same OS of different version or an entirely different OS. Virtual machines are isolated containers, so the guest operating system in the virtual machine doesn’t have access to your computer’s file system, you’ll have to set up shared folders in VirtualBox to share files.

To help the guest operating system understand what’s going on, virtual machine programs present these shared folders as network file shares. The guest operating system accesses a folder on your PC like it would a shared folder on a network.

VirtualBox’s Shared Folders feature works with both Windows and Linux guest operating systems. To use this it, you’ll need VirtualBox’s Guest Additions installed in the guest virtual machine. Click the Devices > Insert Guest Additions CD image option while a virtual machine is running and run the installer from the virtual disc to install it.

 Next, click the Machine > Settings option in a virtual machine’s window and select Shared Folders. Here you can see any shared folders you’ve set up. There are two types of shared folders — Machine Folders are permanent folders that will be shared until you remove them, while Transient Folders are temporary and will be removed when the virtual machine restarts or shuts down.

Click the Add button or right-click in the list and select Add Shared Folder to add a new shared folder. The folder path is the location of the shared folder on your host operating system, while the name is how it will appear inside the guest operating system.

By default, the virtual machine has full read-write access to the shared folder. Enable the Read-only checkbox if you want the virtual machine to only be able to read files from the shared folder.

The Auto-mount checkbox makes the guest operating system attempt to automatically mount the folder when it boots. The Make Permanent checkbox makes the shared folder a Machine Folder — by default, it’s a transient folder.

 You should see the shared folders appear as network file shares if you’re using a Windows guest operating system. Open Windows Explorer or File Explorer, select Network, and look under the VBOXSRV computer.

This is the simplest and easiest way to share your computer file’s with your virtual machine on Oracle VM VirtualBox. I sincerely hope this post was helpful, if it was please like our facebook and twitter page also subscribe to our mail box to get instant update were ever you are, and please share your thoughts about this post in the comment section, thanks.