Network connection was lost for files in virtualbox shared folder

[francescoboc]

Hello everybody, I am a new user of VirtualBox .
I have a Windows 7 guest OS on a Ubuntu 18 host that I mainly use for Adobe applications, with latest VirtualBox 6. I set up a shared folder using Guest Additions and everything works fine, I can access and modify the files with almost all the Windows programs that I installed. There is only one exception: I cannot modify files in the shared folder with Adobe InDesign. Whenever I try to open an .indd file in the shared folder, I get the message:

The network connection was lost for the file Z:\path\to\file.indd or the file was modified by another process.

And then the program crashes. This does not happen if I copy the file to a local Windows folder (but this is annoying because InDesign projects can be very big and have a lot of links). This also does not happen when using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.

I tried disabling UAC and reinstalling Guest Additions, with no success.

Thank you very much to anyone who will help me!

[mpack]

This is quite common. GA shared folders are good for getting files into and out of a VM. They are not good for full duplex I/O from a running guest app. If you want that then you should configure a true network share.

[francescoboc]

This is quite common. GA shared folders are good for getting files into and out of a VM. They are not good for full duplex I/O from a running guest app. If you want that then you should configure a true network share.

Hi, thank you very much for your answer.
Ok, yea I suspected that. Could you please point me to a good resource/tutorial on how to do that?

[mpack]

Not really, I never found that it needed much explanation so I never looked for one. You configure a network that your host and VM can both belong to (i.e. bridged or host-only), and you designate a folder on your host as shared (SAMBA protocol on the host since it's a Linux host and Windows guest). After that the plug and play aspects of most modern OS's will make the shared folder visible to your guest OS in a similar way that the GA share was visible, though on a different network branch.

One wrinkle to watch for: modern Windows OS's have SMB1 support disabled by default for security reasons. I assume modern Ubuntu supports SMB2, but I don't know for sure. I'm also not sure at which point this started being a problem, but with Win7 you probably won't have to do anything.