When you work with virtual machines, sooner or later you run into a situation where a file resides on the host OS and you want to access it on the guest OS, or the other way around. The guest operating system is the one you run inside a VirtualBox virtual machine.
With the host operating system I mean the operating system, where you installed the VirtualBox program itself. As the name implies, a shared folder enables file sharing between the host and the guest operating systems. VirtualBox comes with a feature called shared folders. In this article you’ll learn how to configure and mount a shared folder on your Linux based VirtualBox virtual machine. Once configured, you can easily exchange files between the host and guest OS. Inside your VirtualBox virtual machine you can then mount this shared folder. Ever needed to access a file inside your virtual machine, which resides on your host operating system? With the help of VirtualBox’s shared folders feature, you can select a folder on your host OS to share.
