How to make smooth USB access available to Virtualbox vm

[Manish Jain]

On 07/05/16 12:02, Polytropon wrote:
> On Tue, 5 Jul 2016 08:10:49 +0200, CeDeROM wrote:
>> The USB support on VirtualBox is highly unreliable and version
>> dependant - it works with some releases and with some releases it does
>> not work as expected - not only on FreeBSD (I also use OSX version).
>> This is really annoying when USB stops working after an update to a
>> new version and you depend on this USB access with your work :-(
>
> Just an idea:
>
> Why not mount the USB stick on the FreeBSD host system (or even
> have Gnome automount it), then make the mount directory accessible
> to the "Windows" guest through localhost FTP, localhost SAMBA, or
> another means of virtual network?
>
> It sounds so stupid - it could actually work! ;-)
>

Sounds a bit far-fetched and would anyway need to be implemented all 
over again every time I install FreeBSD.

Just wondering if this is possible - I remember there was an application 
(Nero, I think) - which made it possible to copy/paste to CD/DVD RW from 
Explorer itself, without the need to actually burn it via a CD/DVD 
frontend. Is there any way I can use a CD/DVD just as a part of the 
regular filesystem ? If that is possible, the need for USB support in 
vbox would largely be mitigated.

Is there any other non-USB device which can fill in the need to make 
shared data available to the guest machine ? IOMEGA floppies I think are 
no longer used, but if there is something which provides seamless 
access, I would not mind buying some hardware to solve the problem for 
good (considering the magnitude of the problem, make that 'for very good').

Thanks for any tips.
-- 
Regards

Manish Jain