Placing "Documents" on an external drive

[SteveSawyer]

New to Mac OS here.

My Mac Mini has an old 1TB HD. I'm planning on replacing it with a 512GB SSD. That's going to leave me a bit tight for space. I have a good USB 3.0 1TB external SSD on which I'd like to place my "Documents" folder which has like 90% of all of my user files.

Question: If I do this, is there any way to tell Finder that my Documents folder is no longer on the boot drive or to re-assign a top-level folder on the external drive as my "Documents" folder so it displays in the sidebar of the Finder?

Thanks!

 

[Raz0rEdge]

I would recommend leaving your Documents folder where it is and mounting the external drive and manually use it to store your documents when you save.

You don't want to move the default Documents (even if you could) since that will cause issues when the external drive isn't plugged in.

I'm pretty sure you can drag a folder from the external drive to the sidebar in Finder to make it easy to access.

 

[SteveSawyer]

Thanks, Ashwin. Yes - just tried it, and I can drag folders to the sidebar, so that is certainly workable...

 

[Raz0rEdge]

Now eject the drive cleanly by dragging the icon from your desktop the trash can, unplug the external drive and see if the link disappears from the sidebar (if it doesn't, clicking on it should either hang Finder or throw an error), then plug the drive back in and see if the link is accessible.

Based on this, it'll inform you on how to deal with the drive coming and going.

 

[NSMacGuru]

Maybe look at what is using the most space on your drive, and think about relocating the two biggest hogs to an external: The Photos library, and the iTunes / Apple Music library. If you ever forget to mount the external drive before opening Photos / Apple Music, all you have to do is quite, relaunch holding OPTION and reselect the proper library file (it will remember for the next launch... unless you again forget to mount the external, in which case, repeat).

I'm about to do this with my 2017 iMac 5K. The little 1-TB fusion drive isn't cutting it anymore, and the only other option is surgery... which I'm holding off on for a bit yet.

 

[SteveSawyer]

Maybe look at what is using the most space on your drive, and think about relocating the two biggest hogs to an external: The Photos library, and the iTunes / Apple Music library. If you ever forget to mount the external drive before opening Photos / Apple Music, all you have to do is quite, relaunch holding OPTION and reselect the proper library file (it will remember for the next launch... unless you again forget to mount the external, in which case, repeat).

I'm about to do this with my 2017 iMac 5K. The little 1-TB fusion drive isn't cutting it anymore, and the only other option is surgery... which I'm holding off on for a bit yet.

Thanks. Good suggestion. I may do that. The biggest single chunk is definitely the music collection (about 120GB!) I'm sure there are others I could selectively move to the external rather than the entire Documents folder.

When I had my Windows machine, my external drives were "permanently" mounted to the underside of my desk and always plugged into the machine - a laptop that never sat on my lap!! My plan for this Mini (or its eventual replacement) is to physically mount the main drive (as opposed to the one I use for backups) on the case & plugged directly into a USB port, so it's not going through a hub. It won't normally ever be unmounted, so I'll have to deal with the issues of an unmounted drive only very rarely.

 

[tilt]

I had a similar issue. I now downgraded my 3TB iMac drive to a 256GB SSD, and have a 4 TB NAS where everything of mine is stored. I just mount the NAS when I log in and I have access to everything seamlessly.

Cheers