Fusion 2.0 Mirrored Folders and Vista

[Ed_Leighton-Dic]

I'm running Vista Ultimate on Fusion 2.0, and I've enabled mirrored folders for Documents, Music, and Pictures. I notice, though, that Fusion is using the XP names - My Documents, My Music, and My Pictures - for the folders, rather than replacing the Vista folders. Is there any way to get these to map to the new Vista equivalents?

[rhind]

I'd like to know this too.

And also, is there a way to mirror downloads? Both Leopard and Vista home folders contain a 'Downloads' folder and it would be nice to mirror this too.

Cheers

Russell

[admin]

You should be able to change the name of the mirrored folders if you are comfortable editing your .vmx file.

To do this.

1. Turn on all the mirrored folders you are interested in.

2. Shutdown your VM and close fusion.

3. Open the .vmx file (Right click on the VM in finder and do show package contents ... it is a text file in that folder)

4. Find the sharedFolder# entries. For each some of the entries there should be a shareTag entry. In my vmx file I have:

sharedFolder2.shareTags = "desktop,auto"

sharedFolder2.guestName = "Desktop"

sharedFolder0.shareTags = "documents,auto"

sharedFolder0.guestName = "My Documents'

You should be able to change the guestName entries to your desired name.

5. Save the .vmx file.

6. Start Fusion and your VM.

[rhind]

This doesn't really work. It does rename the folder to 'Documents' from 'My Documents' but my home folder on Vista 64 now has 2 'Document' folders. See the attached screenshot. The mirrored one also has the wrong icon (not that thats a major issue).

Cheers

Russell

[mudaltsov]

The double folder issue seems to be caused by Vista displaying both the real folder that's in C:\Users\(Username) as well as the mirrored Documents folder. They actually have a warning about it if you try to change the location manually through Properties -> Location (see the attached image for an example). The workaround is to manually remove (or rename) the original Documents folder, of course making sure you don't delete any files you need to keep.

If you disable Mirroring in the future, you will need to make sure to create a new folder (or rename the old one back). In my case it was also necessary to restart Windows to make the Documents folder show up again.

For the Downloads folder, you can just share it manually, and use Properties -> Location to point it to
.host\Shared Folders\Downloads. You'll see the dialog from the screenshot prompting you to move files. If you say Yes, it will move the files from the original folder to the shared folder, and delete the original folder. Of course this is optional (I would recommend choosing No).

Note: if you later decide to restore to default, you probably don't want to move files, since it would move them from the Mac into the VM.

[rhind]

Thanks mudaltsov. I'd always moved my 'My Documents' on Vista to a better location than Documents and Settings. Didn't realise you could do this with items like Downloads on Vista.

As for the documents folder: The reason I wanted to was so that my VS 2008 projects were picked up by Time Machine. But VS 2008 doesn't like running projects off a network drive (I'm running Vista 64) so I've set up a scheduled task in the VM that does an xcopy to sync my Documents folder from the VM to a folder inside my Documents folder on the host. This runs every hour so the source code is then picked up by Time Machine. I won't ever modify this code on the Mac so the one-way sync from xcopy is fine for my purposes.

Cheers

Russell