Can't find Multipass Ubuntu files on Mac M1 Finder

I'm running macOS 11.2.1 on a Mini M1 with one internal and two external drives. Using multipass 1.8.1+mac to create an Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS instance in terminal. Once in terminal, I can find the 3rd party software I installed while in the shell. However, when I want to find some of the files I see in Ubuntu on the Mac drive, I cannot find them. I clearly don't understand the relationship between the file system in the ubuntu shell and the Mac File system. As an example, this is from Ubuntu

ubuntu@primary:~$ ls
Home findtestfile.txt mycroft-core snap var

I even created a txt file so I would have something easy to search on, but these files and folders are not together anywhere on the Mac system using Finder (and showing hidden files). Where are they? Help!

3 Answers

Correct, they're not in your Mac filesystem.

Multipass controls Virtual Machines. Your Ubuntu data and applications are on the Ubuntu VM virtual hard drive. The entire virtual hard drive is usually stored as a single file on your Mac filesystem.

That single file is generally NOT readable by the Finder -- it's readable only by the VM application (multipass/hyperkit or multipass/virtualbox).

Actually, they ARE in your Mac's file system. At least they are in mine. On this Intel MacBook running 11.6.5 I'm running Multipass and VirtualBox. Multipass VMs run as processes owned by "root". You can see them in Activity Monitor. You can sudo VirtualBox in Terminal and an instance of VirtualBox will appear with all your Multipass-created VMs listed in the nav pane on the left. Above them is a "Tools" icon. Select it and to the right select the "+" icon. A standard file navigator will come up with which you can browse your file system as the root user. You will see your all your Multipass VMs as folders in the normally hidden path:

"private/var/root/VirtualBox VMs/Multipass"

I hope this helps.

PS: These are the ones that Multipass creates with the VirtualBox driver. Those created using the hyperkit driver I haven't stumbled across as yet ;)

The location of my Multipass VMs (installed May-2022) differs slightly on my iMac (AMD64) and my M1 Mini (ARM64).

For context: I installed the Multipass package 1.9.1+mac-Darwin.pkg with macOS Finder (as opposed to a Homebrew install). The same package worked on both the iMac and the M1. I used wget in a terminal window (per machine) to download the package.

wget 

On my iMac (AMD64), each VM is a <vm-name> subdirectory with this format:

sudo ls -1 "/private/var/root/Library/Application Support/multipassd/vault/instances/<vm-name>"
cloud-init-config.iso
pty
ubuntu-22.04-server-cloudimg-amd64-initrd-generic
ubuntu-22.04-server-cloudimg-amd64-vmlinuz-generic
ubuntu-22.04-server-cloudimg-amd64.img

On my M1 Mini (ARM64), each VM is a <vn-name> subdirectory with this format:

$ sudo ls -1 "/private/var/root/Library/Application Support/multipassd/qemu/vault/instances/<vm-name>"
cloud-init-config.iso
ubuntu-22.04-server-cloudimg-arm64.img