virtualbox.org

Dear all,
I am running an Ubuntu guest on a Yosemite host. I am considering alternatives to manage my quite large amount of photos. If I were to use a shared folder as the working folder for, let's say DigiKam, do you think that would be risky? Would it be error prone to let DigiKam set up its database in a Mac file system via the abstraction layer that VirtualBox provides for shared folders?

I know that an alternative would be to create a virtual disk on the host, and let DigiKam use that instead, but I don't want to have all my photos in just one large .vdi file, because then my nice backup utility on the Mac would not be able to perform incremental backups of my photos.

Regards,
Fredrik Israelsson

I can't promise anything but I have been using shared folders on Mac hosts for years without any data loss. If the photo database is very large I would think disk I/O performance may be an issue.

The shared folders don't support many advanced filesystem features like locking and access control. Some applications can work directly with files on a shared folders, many don't.

Perhaps you could just create a small database and test it.