Parallels freezes with Dropbox

R

RoyT

Junior Member
When Parallels is started up by double clicking a suspended VM, there can be an interaction with Dropbox that brings Parallels to a stop.

If a Tools update is needed, the Tools download starts immediately before granting any access to XP and locks out any other interaction (except Cancel) until the Tools are re-installed.

Meanwhile, Dropbox finishes starting up in the background, notices that there are several GB of files need to be synced and gets right at it. This apparently pre-empts the Tools download because the progress bar stops moving.

If I quit Dropbox, then the Tools download starts up again and everything is ok from there. But unless I know enough to do that, it's not a natural connection to make because Dropbox gives no indication what it's doing unless you ask. I'm guessing a lot of people will stare at that frozen progress bar for a while and then just cancel the Tools download.
 
Not sure this is anything to do with your problem, but my experience of Dropbox eventually led me to just run it on the Mac host and access it from a shared folder within the Windows VM install.. therefore it doesn't try and sync two separate instances of the dropbox folder on both OS's.. saves bandwidth and time getting files to transfer between two synced folders on the same machine!
 
Ditto what Stuart said -- if you're using DropBox in the guest VM to synchronize with the host, you're **much** better off just using shared folders between the host and guest, and making sure to save guest files that you want "synched" to the shared folder location. Note that this doesn't synch them per se, since the docs are just saved to one location, rather than having multiple copies that you have to manage and try to keep consistent.

For example, in my setup, I've got My Documents on the Windows guest rerouted to a mapped drive, which is actually just the Documents folder shared from my host Mac setup. This way I can access all of these docs from both OSes, and don't have to worry about anything getting trapped in the VM if I accidentally break Windows or have to throw out / roll back the VM.

I've got DropBox running on the host Mac side too for synching files with my other non-virtual machines. On my Linux box, for instance, I use VMware with a similar sharing setup to share files between the host Linux OS and the guest OSes.
 
Hi RoyT

if you dont mind can you please explain the most advantage of using this way .There is very simply way that folder sharing please use I am sure you will like it in few days .

vbsmile.png
 
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