Home Folder Question

Hi Everyone!

I use CrashPlan for offsite backup. It used to work quickly & well, but...

When the backup got stuck running for a few days, I asked tech support why. Their reply was that I should eliminate the Home folder from my backup choices.

I thought they meant the folders under MacIntosh SSD/Users/User Name.
I always heard that these were each user's "Home" folder. (One user's has a picture of a house & one's has a generic folder icon.) I have to back these up- They have documents, pictures, etc.

BUT...
I asked terminal to show hidden folders & Finder revealed a hidden folder actually titled "Home". It is at MacIntosh SSD/Home. I guess that's the one they are telling me not to backup. When I click on it, the folder appears to be empty. The Modified Date is today.

Q?...
Before I proceed, I wanted to ask here if there is anything important in that folder that I should backup- Or am I safe to skip it on the backup?

And, if I may sneak in another question....
Also, CrashPlan said to not back up Library folders. Shouldn't those be backed up since they have preference files, application support files, Mail items , etc?

Thanks For Your Guidance!
Paul

I have a "home" (not "Home") folder in the root of my boot drive, empty, last updated three days ago. I have no idea what it is there for. A quick search shows that "home folder" refers to your own folder, the one using your login name and shown as a little house icon in Finder.

I cannot speak to CrashPlan's strange exclusion of Library. Seems to me that's not a good backup, then.

Paul:

Just my opinion here... but I don't think you're getting good advice from the CrashPlan support folks. The reason you have an off site backup is so that you can backup everything. Your Library folders are some of the most important, you do not want to eliminate them. As for the "home" folder, if it's empty, you can eliminate it but frankly, if it's empty, how much time does it take to back it up?

You might want to shop around for another off site backup plan. There are many good ones to choose from.

Thanks Jake & Chscag for helping explain this to me. I sure got confused about what was the home folder & why it exists.

I'll be sure to keep the library folders! Ditching them sounded counterintuitive to me, but I wasn't sure until I asked you guys.

Their reasoning for not backing up the home folder was, per their tech support guy, that it is written to hundreds of times a day. But, mine's empty so it must get erased just as often! In CrashPlan's "Restore" pane, there is only one version of the home folder to restore, so it can't possibly change as often as they said.

I use CrashPlan because they keep previous versions of changed files. They keep every 15 minutes for a week, then daily for a month, then monthly forever. I can change the save intervals. The other plans I looked at only do version retention for Windows computers. I re-check every once in a while, so hopefully another vendor will come up with version retention for OS X users.

For several years, I never had any problems until they changed their interface this month from nice & sleek to clunky and cumbersome. Hopefully it is a work in progress.
I'm not 100% confident in CrashPlan, so I also clone once in a while and backup locally to Time Machine and the super important files also go to a thumb drive.

Thanks Again for the education!
Paul

But if home were written to hundreds of times a day, you would think that my /home folder would have been updated sooner than three days ago. This MBP is never shut down, runs 24/7, so home, if it is important, should be practically up to to date!

Maybe it is only written to at login, or probably startup?

Bob, that could be, but then the advice from CrashPlan is even more bogus. "Hundreds of times a day" does not mesh with boot only.

PGB1 said:

(One user's has a picture of a house & one's has a generic folder icon.)

Click to expand...

The reason only one User folder shows as a house is because you are logged in as that user. If you log in as the other user, their Home folder will appear as a house.

MacInWin said:

Bob, that could be, but then the advice from CrashPlan is even more bogus. "Hundreds of times a day" does not mesh with boot only.

Click to expand...

Jake,

Are you logged in as an Admin, or Standard User? Maybe it is something to do with it?

I'm an admin, and yes, I know that the house icon is for the current login account, but all of those folders are in /Users and the folder that we are talking about is labeled "home" in the root, so it's /home or /Home. And it doesn't have the username, just "home." But all of the Apple documentation I can find refers consistently to the user folder as the home folder, never to this generic "/home" folder. Another curiosity is that my system has /home and it's not hidden to terminal, doesn't show in Finder, but Paul's folds was named /Home and was hidden, apparently. In Finder, if I use the Go menu and Go to folder and enter /home, I'm taken there in Finder, too. So it's a very strange folder. Get Info shows that it is read only to system, wheel and everyone, so I don't even know what could/would write to it. It's also listed as a volume of unknown format to Get Info. Very strange indeed.

Interesting, Indeed!

I checked Get Info for /Home & found it was modified today at 12:19pm. I wasn't near the computer then, but it was on & not sleeping. Wonder what wrote to it?
It showed Capacity as Zero bytes and Available was also Zero bytes, as was Used. So, if it has zero capacity, what possibly was written there at 12:19pm?

Get Info also shows that Permissions say "You can only read". For fun, I clicked the drop down arrow to see if I could change permissions (which I would not do) and nothing showed up. The box collapsed.

About the house picture-
For fun, I logged out of on account and into the other user's account and the house picture seems to be only for one account. (To Clarify What I'm Clunkily Trying To Say: I have two user accounts. One is called "Work Stuff" and one is called "Real Life". Real Life is the only administrator & it has the house picture. Work Stuff has the generic picture of a folder.) No big deal, just what I found.

As far as CrashPlan goes- They have never lost a file in my archive, but their new "improved" application is really troublesome. Their tech support, which used to be great, is now lacking- as you all can see from this post. I think I'll shop for an alternative that allows versions of files with a Mac. (Lots allow it for Windows computers, just not Mac.)

Thanks Again All for helping me learn more!
Paul