Path changes in Docker Desktop for Windows

Since Docker Desktop is “just” a desktop on top of a virtual machine (for Linux containers), the data will be in the virtual machine. You won’t find it easily and you don’t have to. Recent Docker Desktop for Windows has no docker-desktop-data distribution, only a data disk mounted into the virtual machine and into the system container that runs the Docker CE daemon.

I wrote about the data here:

https://dev.to/rimelek/everything-about-docker-volumes-1ib0#where-does-docker-store-data

and why we don’t need the data folder usually

https://dev.to/rimelek/everything-about-docker-volumes-1ib0#editing-files-on-volumes

If you search for “nsenter” on the forum, you can find some posts where we explained how you could ru a command in the system container that runs the daemon. For example here:

What you found is probably the path of the system containers’ files. Those are running as containerd containers, not as Docker containers.