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Comment by singular | Hacker News Reader

I've had quite a few issues with it.

1. Copy + paste randomly breaks between host win32, client ubuntu32.

2. Random freezes every so often.

3. Seamless mode extremely unreliable, does not draw correctly.

4. Horrible issues with shared folders breaking io operations. I actually got a (trivial) patch into golang to work around this issue (!). This also completely breaks ido mode completions in emacs.

5. Occasionally shared folders get into an odd state and no files can be read from/written to them.

4 + 5 might be specific to the way I use shared folders though, as I access them via a dropbox folder sat in a truecrypt volume.

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I use VirtualBox to run Ubuntu 32-bit and various other Linux distros on Win7 64-bit. No Truecrypt or Dropbox is involved. I have similar occasional issues with shared folders.

Access denied randomly when trying to overwrite files. Files renamed in the host becoming inaccessible from the guest. NTFS symlinks in the host appearing as normal folders in the guest one day and as broken links the next day. Terribly slow I/O overall. I used to bookmark and keep track of several bug reports on the official bugtracker, but I gave up because nobody seemed to care.

The only reason I still use shared folders is because it's still slightly less painful than CIFS/Samba.

Hm, I've seen some really weird unicode-related corruption hitting files shared between guest and host due to (I assume) different line ending convention. Figuring out what was going on was not fun at all.

I've definately noticed number 4 and 5. For my Windows Host, Ubuntu Guest, modified files work fine, but I have to remount (or reboot) for new or moved files... It's awful and makes me mad every time, but not much I can do about it.

I use a virtual machine each for my php and django apps, and use VboxHeadlessTray to hide them in my system bar. Works great except for painful upgrades of VirtualBox in Windows, associated having to upgrade guest additions and the shared folders.

I run Ubuntu guest on a Win 7 host, and I notice 1 and 2 quite often. 4 and 5 I have NEVER hit, and yet a lot of replies to this seem to never have hit 1 or 2 and ONLY 4 and 5.

It seems to have gotten less stable for me during the 3.x to 4.x switch, but not nearly so much as to make me want to stop using it (although there are days...) It allows me to do work I wouldn't otherwise be able to easily; I freaking love it.

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