What is the difference between shared folder and synced folder in Vagrant?

Question

While going through Vagrant tutorials, I have seen two options for sharing folders between host and guest machines - shared folders and synced folders. What are the difference between them?

Or, is synced folder the new name for shared folder, in Vagrant 2?

score 8 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 24 '13 at 01:31

8

Shared Folders is more VirtualBox specific (vboxsf) and have known performance issues as number of files grows.

Vagrant v2 (For vagrant 1.1.x and 1.2.x) docs use a more generic name Synced Folder, which includes the default vboxsf and NFS.

In addition to vboxsf and NFS, sshfs is also worth looking into if your host is running Linux.

answered Jul 24 '13 at 01:31

Terry Wang

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I can't stress the "have known performance issues" topic. Especially when you host is Windows, this can really become an issue. – mark Nov 29 '13 at 23:34
@mark: But the vagrant documentation states that NFS is not supported on Windows... – Zequez Jan 20 '14 at 18:48

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 23 '13 at 20:45

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As you guessed, synced folder is the new, more generic name for a feature that is not only VirtualBox specific anymore as of Vagrant 1.1.

answered Jul 23 '13 at 20:45

cmur2

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What is the difference between shared folder and synced folder in Vagrant?

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