This article shows you step-by-step how to configure and mount a shared folder for your Linux based guest OS, running as a VirtualBox virtual machine. Thanks to the shared folder feature, you can simply copy the SSH keys from your host OS to your guest OS. You need the correct SSH keys on the guest OS, for write access to your GitHub repository. After fixing or improving some code, you want to push the changes back to the remote repository.

You cloned one of your GitHub repositories inside your guest OS.

With the help of the shared folder, you can easily copy the screenshot image files to your host OS. You want to insert these screenshot images in a document you are writing on your host OS.

You took a few screenshots inside a guest OS.

Through the use of a shared folder, you can quickly copy the background image to the guest OS.

While trying out a new Linux distribution in a virtual machine, you want to configure the desktop environment the exact same way as on your host OS.

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.

Mount virtualbox shared folder