Accessing files from outside Virtualbox

[Donone]

Newbie to this.
My purpose in using VB is to reduce the tons of software I wish to use from clogging my registry/system.
I thought I would put say MS Office in VB along with associated programs.
My concern is how to get the documents written to the outside world. If anything goes wrong how do I get them?
Another might have Programming software etc.
At present on the main computer I use constant backup everytime an important document closes, to copy it to a separate hard disk.
Can I do anything like this?
Can I see the files from the host?
Thanks

[Sasquatch]

Did you bother to read the manual? Like any other virtualisation software, VB has the option of Shared Folders, which lets you access folders on the host in the Guest.

As for the programming, if you do everything inside the VM, you only have to shutdown the VM and backup the VDI file associated with it. Note that some debuggers might not run inside VB properly, or not run at all.

[Donone]

Thank you Sasquatch, and yes I did read the parts I thought might be relevant (rather than all of it and get confused). I read about writethrough and thought that therein existed my problem, and I couldn't quite follow the differences between disk types. The question arose in my mind and I assumed that I had read what mattered. I must apologise profusely.
You have indeed answered my question.

[TerryE]

Welcome to our forum. You might want to take this opportunity to browse the Forum Posting Guide. This contains some useful tips on how to search for VBox knowledge and how to frame Qs.

Read up on Shared Folders. As long as you've got the Guest Additions installed on your guest VBox can make host directory trees available to the guest OS as if they were NTFS file shares but without the network overhead. Use the bold phrases as search keys.