Allow control over disk image location

[stroiman]

First of all, thanks for making this app! Having a virtualized linux on ARM architecture is very helpful for my work.

But I would have liked to be able to customize the location of the disk image files, for at least two reasons:

• Be able to cleanup orphaned files. The Library folder tends to accumulate a lot of waste on a Mac that has been running for years. This is not so much of a problem for most data, but when having disk image files at > 20Gb it does become a problem.
• Easy exclusion from backup software. I really don't want these files to be backed up, neither to my on-site time machine, nor my secondary cloud base backup solution.

I would kinda argue, that virtual disks is for virtualization software a bit like document files for a word processor, the user should have full control over their location.

Also, finding the files is not easy, I couldn't find anywhere in the app, that actually displays the file location. It took a google search to learn where they are located, so I could add the backup exclusions.

[BlakeOttinger]

This would also be a very useful improvement for users who might need to run VMs off of an external disk. (Users of 256GB machines who have external disks mounted, etc).

[osy]

This is a limitation of the app sandbox. You can manually move the .utm bundles to another location and they should automatically get updated as shortcuts.

[edhemphill]

I think the team should reconsider this issue. Not being able to move the VM disk files easily is pretty much a non-starter for any serious user of large VMs. I know most people are just doing development off their laptop and don't care - but if UTM envisions themselves really replacing VMWare and Parallels on Mac entirely, then this issue must be resolved. Frankly, the product comes off more like a toy virtualization tool than a serious replacement for VMWare or Parallels without this.

[cross]

I also agree. I am just starting to use this, and the first thing I was missing in the creation of VM process was a "where do you want to store this?" question.
Even if there is some reason you can't just place it elsewhere, which seems most reasonable, I think the U/I should provide instructions, or automatically perform the operations, to ask you where you want it and if you specify a location other than default it should put it there for you. If it has to do it as a separate step for some reason, akin to earlier suggestion that the user can move the .utm file, then it can just do that for you at the end of the VM creation process.