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BobbyWong
Contributor
Contributor

Shared folders not refreshing

Hello,

Here is the issue I am having and I hope someone can provide some insight. I have VMware Workstation 12 Pro installed on a ThinkPad with Windows 10 Pro as the host OS. The VM has Windows 7 Ultimate installed.

My issue is with shared folder content. If I open a file via Windows Explorer on my host machine and make changes to it, when I save and close it the timestamp reflects that changes have been made. If I open the same file via Windows Explorer in the VM and make some more changes, when I save and close it the timestamp remains the same, regardless of how long I wait. This is a simple explanation of what is happening. That being said, I think this issue is also impacting our development environment. Files that should refresh automatically for debug are not doing so after changes are made. Any insights as to what may be happening and a solution or workaround would be great.

Let me know if additional information is needed. Thanks in advance!

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steve_goddard
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Hello there,

Thank for reporting this issue.

It is a known issue and for Windows Workstation the WIndow file system feature directory change notification has not been completed as yet.

This is the file system feature that allows applications that watch folders to be notified automatically of underlying file system changes that they might be interested in knowing about.

It has been on my to-do list for a good while now.  I really hope to get the time to complete the feature, which has been implemented fully in our Mac Fusion product.

Having said that, the Fusion product does not work correctly, in this case, so you have raised two issues here: feature implementation for Windows hosts; and an issue with file data modification notification.

Also, to note, that if you do a directory read or a get the attributes (e.g. timestamps) of a file it will return the correct updated time after file modification. Currently, applications such as Explorer just will not be notified of the changes automatically as they occur and refresh their contents accordingly. Currently, that has to be manually done (via function key F5 or menu refresh if available).

You can verify from a command prompt and issue a directory read request: "dir z:\sharedfolderwithfile\ /T:w"

What is the application that you are using for your application development?

When do you think it is missing file changes? Maybe I can replicate this in my own set up for verification and test purposes.

Steve

Thanks. Steve
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BobbyWong
Contributor
Contributor

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. We found a workaround for the issue the other day.

I have two VMs set-up. The development environments that had the issue are VS.NET 2005 and VS.NET 2017, one in each VM. In both cases, the dev environment was missing the file changes after I compiled. Typically, an outside project with build events, automatically refreshes in the main project. This stopped happening. I had to close out and reopen the main project for it to refresh properly.

Here's the workaround. Since, I work on a network and/or connect via VPN when out of the office, we set-up the shared drive on the host machine as a network drive. It is mapped to a drive letter. We also added a local user that will allow me to connect to that same drive when I am not connected to the network. Essentially, we do not use the Shared Folders functionality through the VMware.

Hope this information helps!

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axeelb
Contributor
Contributor

Hello @steve_goddard 

I'm currently using VMWare workstation 15.5.7 and it seems not to be available so far.

Any update about this feature? 

Thanks,

Alex.

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