Here’s a helpful, practical guide for using VMware Workstation Pro 16.2.5 (Build 20904516) to transfer large files securely and for free, without relying on cloud services or external drives.

Security note: The built‑in methods (drag‑drop, shared folders) use VMware Tools – they are encrypted over the VM communication interface (VMCI) but not end‑to‑end encrypted if the host or guest is compromised.

Click Add to browse for a folder on your host machine to share.

  • Install rclone on both endpoints or just on the sender.
  • Configure remote (S3, Backblaze B2, Google Drive, SFTP).
  • Use rclone copy --progress --transfers=N --checkers=M to optimize parallelism.
  • For extra security, enable rclone crypt to encrypt at rest before upload.
  • Pros: handles chunking, retries, cloud backends, encryption. Cons: cloud storage limits for free tiers.

VMware Workstation Pro 16.2.5 (Build 20904516) is a robust virtualization platform that allows you to run multiple operating systems simultaneously on a single physical machine. While primarily a development and testing tool, one of its most practical daily uses is moving data between host and guest systems. For large files, standard "copy-paste" often fails or causes the UI to hang, requiring more stable and secure methods.

Reality:

  • Ensure VMware Tools is installed and up-to-date. Good for small/medium files; for multi-GB use Shared Folders or other methods.

: Fixed a prominent bug that caused an "unsupported processor" error when attempting to install Windows 11 Windows Server 2022 on a virtual machine. : Continued support for the Sandbox Renderer

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