An efficient way to transfer a large amount of data from a guest Virtualbox VM to the host system?

I want to transfer over my entire user folder from an earlier Linux installation. I haven’t got the Virtualbox’ ‘drag and drop’ feature to work (requires guest additions), and wouldn’t want to rely on it anyway with this amount of data involving hidden files and varying permissions. The ‘shared folders’ feature appears to be from host to guest only, sadly.

I don’t have any network location at hand at the time.

“rsync -av source destination” should work and likely is the fastest way to retain all the attributes.


To an external drive (added to the VM) I presume? rsync is indeed reliable and happens to ship with Fedora.

To the host, to an external drive, to a remote server, it is all the same to rsync since it is capable for copying from one directory (attached filesystem) to another or from one host to another.

The vm should have a network connection to the host machine even if no other network connection exists.

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