Moving Home Folder

Has anyone moved the location of the home folder to an external drive? Its really not clear if it can be done without any issues. In windows you could just move your My Documents folder without any issues. I am new to the Mac platform but I love what I have been able to do thus far.

Can someone who has had great success at doing this advise me? Can it be done and if so what's the easiest way to do it, or is it not recommended? I have read some people who have done this and have had many issues.

iMac Intel Core 2 Duo 3.06 GHz Memory: 4 GB, Mac OS X 10.5.6

Not that I know of

Why are you trying to move the home folder, is it a space issue? There are other ways of freeing up space on your start-up drive

Have never done it, but would advise against moving your home folder. You'll have most of the same issues as renaming it cause. Anything that uses user specific preferences vs system wide preferences will no longer find them in their proper location, keychain info will be missing, etc.

You should be able to move your Documents folder without much issue depending on what apps you're using, the same as in Windows. Any apps that use that location as their auto save and restore location however, would no longer know where they are. Not sure if there are any like this or not. I use Aperture, and it saves everything currently in the Pictures folder. Know if I move that folder, Aperture wouldn't be able to find all my current pictures.

louishen said:

Not that I know of

Why are you trying to move the home folder, is it a space issue? There are other ways of freeing up space on your start-up drive

Click to expand...

I want to keep all my music, pictures, documents on a external drive due to the large amount I have and just use my Imac drive for programs etc...

Still Looking for help

I am still hoping someone on here that has had success doing this can help me.

Keeping your iTunes collection on an external

The following assumes you want to keep all your iTunes music and movies on an external disk and ensure new music is always stored on the external drive.

First, you need to consolidate your iTunes Library to a folder you have chosen on the external drive.

Set the new iTunes folder location to the external in iTunes preferences > Advanced

Select the command consolidate library from the Advanced Menu. This will copy all your iTunes media to the external folder and link the iTunes library file to it

The files will now be on the external while the library.xml file (the index as it were) will still be in the Users > Me > Music folder of your mac.

If you want this file on the external as well as well, copy it to external iTunes folder, start itunes with the alt key pressed and you will have the option to select the library file now on the external



Select the library file you just copied and now both your music and the library are on the external

You can now delete the old iTunes folder off your mac

You can also use the choose library dialogue to switch between a large music collection on the external and a smaller music folder on the mac if you wish

You can set Aperture to use other locations than ~/Pictures. Not sure about iphoto though. All in all I would not move your entire home directory, there's big time problems that could result from that.. like not being able to log in as that user.

It worked for me.

Here is an article on moving the home folder. I have just done so following the instructions and it appears to work just fine. So far I have not encountered any problems with permissions, keychain, etc. (I just logged in here automatically.)

The only thing that did not work as described in the article was dragging and dropping the home folder to the new drive. When I tried this it only copied a little bit of the contents of the home folder, but my home folder is huge, which is why I was doing this. I dragged and dropped each of the items over and it went well. Be sure to follow the instructions to change the path to the home folder in the user accounts and restart the Mac.

I am using OS 10.5.5 and will update to OS 10.5.6 as soon as I complete a backup of the OS drive. (I have just finished backing up the drive with the home folder.) As with anything, it would be a good idea to have a current backup before trying it.

To quote that article:

Why would you bother to move your ‘Home’ folder at all? For the same reason why I recommend you keep your ‘My Documents’ folder on a completely separate hard drive. It’s just easier to manage should something happen to your OS or primary drive.

Click to expand...

And if "something happens" to this external drive - you have just lost all of your data.

If you only have a single external drive, you really should be using it as a backup device, not as storage for all your data. Unless that is, you can afford to lose it all if/when the external drive dies.

bobtomay said:

To quote that article:


And if "something happens" to this external drive - you have just lost all of your data.

If you only have a single external drive, you really should be using it as a backup device, not as storage for all your data. Unless that is, you can afford to lose it all if/when the external drive dies.

Click to expand...

Although mine was on an internal drive, there is no reason whatsoever that doing this should preclude backing up data. It is only good practice to have backups. As an acquaintance once said, "backups make the world a better place."

The specific reason for my "just in case" comment is that one should always try to have a current backup prior to undertaking a major change in things. Strange things can happen. You might not like it and want to revert to the last backup...an OS update might bork your system or have problems with critical applications.

My preference is for an internal drive for a variety of reasons, but there is no reason not to try it on an external drive if one has an appropriate backup.