VirtualBox — choosing a shared directory?

Question

has anyone tried designating their entire user directory as the shared VirtualBox directory? All the examples on the web seem to illustrate the sharing of some self-contained directory, but it would be convenient if I could designate ~/, or even ~/Documents or ~/Desktop. The one problem I could see with ~/ is that it contains the ~/VirtualBox VMs/ directory -- not sure if that would actually cause any trouble. I use VirtualBox on Mac/Linux to run Windows. Would each have its own set of issues?

Answer 1

You can have your home directory as read-only, an another directory as read-write, something like ~./VirtualBoxWriteable.

But if you are going to use your virtual machine carefully, like it would be your main SO, with anti-virus, etc, there should be not problem to share the entirely home directory as read-write.

Answer 2

You can share any directory, but keep in mind that your virtual machine can read (and write if the shared folder is not read-only) to those files and directories.

I won't trust my home directory to a virtual Windows machine (I like to be adventurous in my VM :p), but I see no problem in sharing just ~/Documents. Security-wise, you would keep the VirtualBox shared folders separate from your other files and directories to avoid any data-loss if you come across malware in your Windows VM.