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luv2ski
Contributor
Contributor

Fusion won't allow me to share my home directory's Library subfolder from MacOS X with my Windows VM. How do I fix this?

I'm using Fusion 10 on Mac OS X High Sierra with a Windows 10 VM.  All software is patched up to date.

Sharing visible folders from OS X to the Windows VM works fine.  Sharing hidden folders is not working, period.  I agree that casual users of OS X and VMware will not need to do hidden folder sharing but technical users such as I do occasionally need to reference these directories from apps running in the VM.  Setting up sharing of hidden folders from the host OS is not trivial by design. The structure of OS X's UI makes the likelihood of a casual user stumbling upon a method of discovering hidden folders and thereby becoming confused is extremely small.  I'm not proposing that hidden folders be made visible in the Finder pop-up dialog of VMware's Sharing settings UI when one is adding a shared folder.  I'm proposing that they not be systematically broken in the guts of VMware if the advanced user has added a hidden folder to the Sharing list.  To be able to do so, the advanced user has had to deliberately leverage certain tricks to circumvent the invisibility of these hidden folders. This is a deliberate process that the casual user will not stumble upon.

Here is a stepwise procedure to set up sharing of a hidden folder ($HOME/Library) and a method to illustrate how VMware doesn't in fact share it. This implies that it is somehow prohibited either purposefully or otherwise in the VMware code implementation.

1. Within the host OS (Mac OS X) click on the desktop background to switch context to the Finder app.

2. Select the Go to Folder menu item from the Finder's Go menu. A pop-up window will appear containing an input text box.

3. Enter ~/Library in the text box.

4. A finder window will launch displaying the contents of the hidden Library subfolder that exists under the home directory. The title bar of this Finder window contains a folder icon and the title "Library".

5. Launch VMware Fusion and open its Virtual Machine Library window. Select an existing Windows VM. Using the VirtualMachine menu, open the VM settings for the selected Windows VM instance.

6. The virtual machine's Settings window. will appear.  Select the Sharing item to bring up the folder sharing settings. Make sure the Enable Shared Folders checkbox is selected. You will notice there is a list box containing any previously shared folders. If this list is empty, you may want to add a folder or two for illustrative purposes. For example, you could share your Mac's Applications folder.

7. Locate the Library Finder window you opened above.  Drag and drop the folder icon from the title bar of this window into the VMware Sharing settings window's list box area. The Library folder will now appear in the shared folder list together with any previously shared folders. You can now close the VMware Settings window.

8. Switch to the Windows VM and open the Windows File Explorer.  Locate the Shared Folders link on the left panel and select it to view the set of folders you've shared from the host OS. You will see all visible shared folders from the Mac OS X host except for the hidden Library folder that was just shared.  Rebooting the VM and even rebooting VMware does not change this.

3 Replies
Mikero
Community Manager
Community Manager

hmmmm... good question. I verified this behavior on my systems. My expectation is this is very deliberate.

Let me see if there's a vmx flag that still allows those folders to share.

Would you mind sharing your use case?

Why do you need access to those protected files?

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Michael Roy - Product Marketing Engineer: VCF
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ColoradoMarmot
Champion
Champion

Two ideas on a workaround (though I'm also curious as to why):

sudo chflags -nohidden ~/Library on the host to unhide the library (I do that as part of every upgrade FWIW...because I do fiddle with those files all the time.

Or create a symbolic link to the hidden folder on the desktop, and then share that with the VM.

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bfan
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

I tried it with Fusion 10.1.1. The shared hidden folder can be shown in the Win10 guest VM.

Did you enable 'Show hidden files, folders and drives' option in Windows ?