I installed Microsoft’s Virtual PC 2007 the other day, and it helpfully gives you the option of where you want to store the virtual hard drive for the virtual machine you’re creating. I put it on my D: drive, which is a pair of 500 GB Western Digital drives in a RAID 1 array. I expected all the changes I made to that virtual machine to be kept inside the virtual hard drive. Not quite! Virtual PC 2007 creates a folder inside the documents folder called My Virtual Machines, then inside that it creates a sub-folder with the name of your virtual machine. And inside that sub-folder, it stores all of the files that it creates for disk undo changes. In my case, after only a week, it was 2 GB of files in total. Because I use FolderShare to sync my documents folder across all my PCs and laptops, this was 2 GB worth of files that were useless everywhere but the computer that was running the virtual machine.
I scoured through all the program settings, and couldn’t find any option that controlled where these files are stored. Ugg. The good news? I was able to move the virtual machine files out of my documents folder and into the same folder as the virtual machine hard drive on my D: drive and everything worked seamlessly – it didn’t even prompt me asking where the files went. I made a slight change to the virtual machine, saved the changes, and watched as the change was comitted to the folder on the D: drive.
So, if you’re curious about whether or not you can move Virtual PC 2007 files out of the Documents Folder, yes you can!