How to manually copy backup files from VirtualBox to the host?

csharp · March 4, 2025, 9:20pm

I’m running HAOS on a VirtualBox running on a MacOS machine.

Yesterday, something went wrong with my HAOS. The supervisor doesnt seem to be working. I’ll attach a few screenshots below:

It keeps trying to spawn run and fails…

The supervisor is not working, so other stuff like ssh and terminal are also not working…

There are definitely backups as I automated them, but they seem to be not visible from the web UI.

I was able to locate the backup tar files in the VM like below:

However, I’m having trouble figuring out how to copy these files to my mac, after which I’ll just be able to fresh install and restore from backup.

I tried turning on some shared folders but i can’t really seem to understand how they work.

If someone could help me figure out how to get the HA backup files, that would be of great help, thanks!

forsquirel · March 5, 2025, 12:31am

Shared folders are shared between the VM and the host running the VM. So anything on that VM in a shared folder would be on your local machine in the folder specified.

so /dev would be be at /vm/dev on your machine and so on.

csharp · March 5, 2025, 10:51am

That’s what I thought but I don’t really see the shared folders.

“path” are on the mac and “at” are on the VM, right?

Do I have to reboot the VM for them to work?

francisp · March 5, 2025, 2:19pm

Correct

I think with a linux VM, you need to map a shared folder to somewhere in /mnt

csharp · March 5, 2025, 3:26pm

Update: I couldn’t really get the shared folders to work, but I fixed the original issue that the supervisor was being weird by pulling a bunch of images and restarting a bunch of containers.

francisp · March 5, 2025, 3:59pm

So now take measures to copy your backups of the VM disk regularly.

csharp · March 5, 2025, 4:55pm

Yeah I’m trying to do that now. I am trying to mount my host Mac machine’s folder onto the VM, but I can’t seem to figure out how. I can easily connect to my host machine from my other computers by simply smb://,

But I can’t seem to figure out how to on the HA UI.

I added a folder here on the settings file sharing

and tried using it like this on the web ui

The host errors say:

CIFS: VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -13

Changing to legacy versions didn’t help either.

I’ve acquired the backup files, and installed the Samba share addon so I can access the files in the VM from my computer, but they won’t be of help if supervisor or other services suddenly decide to stop running. What’s a clean way to mount Mac’s folders as Network storage via smb to HA?