You should now see the Shared Clipboard and Drag'n'Drop dropdown options.

In the window that pops up, click on General and then click on the Advanced tab.

Select your virtual machine, right-click and select Settings.

For example, copy and paste is best for sharing text and small files, such as copying code from a browser on your host PC into a terminal session in the guest OS.īelow, we'll look at sharing data using these three methods on virtual machines running on Oracle VirtualBox and VMware Workstation Player.

Drag and drop (also known as copy and paste)Įach of these methods is ideally suited for a specific type of data and expected use.

The options for sharing data between a host PC and guest operating system running in a virtual machine are what you might expect: In very general terms, this lets you install an operating system on an existing OS, much like you would an app. How To Transfer Files From Virtual Machine To HostĪ virtual machine is a software environment that emulates the hardware required to install an operating system (OS). Step 3Ĭlick on 'Devices' tab provided on the VM VirtualBox taskbar and select 'Shared Folders' from the drop-down list.Let's look at the different methods for transferring files between your virtual machine guest operating system and host PC using VirtualBox or VMware. Start your Guest OS in which you want to share drives/folders and files contained in them.

Run your Host OS and launch VM VirtualBox. The Guest can be any version of Microsoft Windows (98, XP, Vista, 7, etc.).Before you implement these steps on your VM, make sure that you have: However, with little effort I worked out these issues. I followed the steps provided from various help articles, but they were quite tricky and not straightforward and easy to implement. It needs some steps before you can use host drives and folders (and surely all the files contained in them). However, sharing host drivesolders might not be as simple as clicking and enabling sharing.

VM does not provide usage of host drives/folders on Guest OS until they are explicitly shared. Once downloaded, setup a Guest OS (for which you can follow VM VirtualBox's provided instructions - installing Guest OS is not discussed here). One of these free VM managers is Oracle's VM VirtualBox, which can be downloaded from Oracle's website for all popular operating systems, such as Linux, Windows and Mac. Most people like to get free VM managers, so that they can install as many operating systems as they like over the host operating systems. However, the main functionality of all VMs are the same. There are several virtual machine managers present in the market.

Share files between virtualbox and host