Windows System Files on Mac Desktop

Greetings, I'm a new user and installed Parallels for the first time around two weeks ago. It's all good so far. I just have a question. Yesterday when I was working on a Mac issue I went to the console and turned on "show hidden files". I had Windows running in coherence mode while doing this and I noticed that four or five Windows files appeared on the Mac desktop. These were thumbs.db, .ini files, that sort of thing. I am curious to know why they are there, where they come from and what would happen were they to be inadvertently deleted. I'd really like to know. Thanks in advance. GL

 

Hello GreenLantern,

Those files appeared on your Mac's desktop because you have 'Share desktop' option enabled in the virtual machine configuration.

You can disable it from Virtual Machine --> Configure --> Options --> Sharing --> Shared Profile --> Configure.

If you remove those files they would be removed from the Windows desktop as well, so i recommend to keep them or disable desktop sharing if those icons are annoying for you

 

Hi YanaYana, thanks for the data. That's good to know. I'll share a confession with you. Don't tell anyone else I didn't realize that I had coherence mode activated at the time and I didn't put two and two together and figure out that they were coming from Windows. That epiphany came a few minutes after I deleted them. Believe me, my face is red. I'm here to try and figure out what damage I did. I started up Parallels (I have Windows on a Boot Camp partition) and so far everything seems to work. I'm worried, however, that at some point I may have a nasty surprise and I'd like to avoid that if possible. What do you think? GL

 

Don't worry, I was just trying to make it look more serious than in reality. You have deleted the link files (.lnk) which are in fact just aliases, so everything should still work fine - but files may appear again on your Mac's desktop.

Sorry for this trick, i just hope you would not remove any hidden files without any advice given in the future.

 

Thank you YanaYana. I feel duly chastened by the experience. Nice of you to respond. GL

 

I was happy to help