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How to Move the Home Folder in OS X - and Why

Wednesday, February 6th, 2008
at 3:31am

Someone, who can be identified as Darwin9 in the chat room, sent me a “How to Move the Home Folder in OS X Leopard.” I hadn’t done it yet, but it’s something that I was hoping to do for my next installation.

  1. Click on ‘Macintosh HD’ in the Finder and open the ‘Users’ folder. In here you will find a folder named after your shortname. This is your home folder. As it is currently your active home folder it will have a ‘house’ icon assigned to it. Copy this folder to the 2nd hardrive by simply dragging it (moving files / folders to a 2nd volume in OS X only copies the content, it doesn’t remove it from its original location). Note: The copied folder will not have the ‘house’ icon as it is not yet recognized as you active home folder. We will change this in the following steps.
  2. Open the ‘System Preferences’ application from either the Dock, the Applications folder or from the Apple menu.
  3. Click on the ‘Accounts’ icon in the ‘System’ section.
  4. After entering your password to unlock the padlock, CTL-Click (or right click if you have this enabled for your mouse) on the active admin account (from the list of user accounts in the left pane) to reveal an ‘Advanced Options’ contextual menu. Select this item.
  5. You will be presented with a pane full of advanced settings (and also a warning about how you should only change these settings if you know what you are doing!). Ignore all of these settings except for the ‘Home Directory’ option. This is the path that OS X uses to locate your home folder when you login. It should say: /Users/shortname
  6. Click on the ‘Choose’ button, and browse to the home folder in the new location (this will be the folder you moved in Step 1 which will be named after your shortname). After you select the new location, the ‘Home directory’ path should change to something like: /Volumes/shortname.
  7. OS X will continue to use the original home folder until you restart. So restart the computer and login as normal. To confirm that the new home folder is now active, browse to the folder you copied to the 2nd hardrive and check it has the ‘house’ icon assigned to it. Now that your home folder is successfully located on your 2nd drive, you can delete the original home folder in the Users folder. It should now have a generic folder icon as it is no longer the active home folder.

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. Scott added, in a follow-up email:

Everything will work just the same as normal, it’s all transparent to the user. The only difference will be that all of the stuff inside your home folder (Desktop, Documents, Downloads Pictures, Music, Movies, etc.) will actually be kept on the 2nd drive instead of on the 1st (boot drive).

This is great if you ever have to reinstall OS X, you can erase the 1st boot drive, reinstall OS X, and perform steps 2 - 7 again and you’ll be back up and running with all of your stuff in the home folder untouched! You don’t need to perform step 1 because the home folder is already on the 2nd drive at this point. You will have to install Applications and set Global and System Preferences again though as i will explain below.

All you have to understand is that OS X uses 4 distinct folders: Applications, Library, System and Users. The first 3 all have to remain on the 1st boot drive - Applications and its contents all have their permissions set to allow the System to read and write to them, so this is where you should keep ALL applications.

The Library is where all Admin level files are kept. These are files that effect every user globally like system preferences, and there permissions are set to only allow Admin users access to change things in here.

And the System folder is just that… it’s for the System only and you should very rarely have to change anything in this folder. Even if you try to mess with this folder as an Admin account holder, you will most likely be denied or asked to authenticate, because the System owns most of the files in here.

The 4th folder Users, includes a dedicated folder for each user (named after the shortname) that has been setup in OS X (This is the folder we located to the 2nd drive). All of your user files and folders and kept in here. Everything in this folder has the permissions set to allow only that individual user access to it. So the (User) Library folder in here is very similar to the (Admin) Library mentioned above, except that its contents are specific to only the user in question.

This means preferences that are specific to your personal stuff are kept in here. So things like custom application preferences, email accounts, user installed screen-savers, fonts, plug-ins and codecs, and your Desktop picture, Finder and Dock settings etc.

You could get away with changing the location of your home folder whenever you want probably, not just after the initial install. I warn against it because if something goes wrong it is effortless to start again in the beginning.

But OS X will handle moving your home folder just fine if you follow the steps I gave each time. If your wondering why it doesn’t break links between applications and preferences etc, its because OS X uses Directory Services to keep a central database of all users and the locations of their home folders etc in one place. When applications and preferences try to perform user specific actions, it all flows through Directory Services - So if you keep the database up to date by following the steps I provided, OS X will always know where everything is! ;)

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34 Comments

RaVeN DiZzle

February 6th, 2008
at 4:55am

Thanks man, these tips are helping me out alot. I just got my macbook pro and my plan is to be a mac guru within a week:D

Also that top 100 apps list was aweome as well:)

Jim

February 6th, 2008
at 8:20am

Do you think it could be possible to put your Home folder on a Time capsule drive and boot from that? If so how about having your MacBookPro boot from that same home folder. Just a wild dream maybe but it would save syncing two machines.

Bluejade

February 6th, 2008
at 8:58am

Thank you for nice informative article : )

I am just curious what happens when you boot up with the disk, containing the user folder, disconnected?

jack

February 6th, 2008
at 9:44am

very interesting…. but you didn’t specify how this would work on the different hardware configs… i have a Mac Pro at work, and could easily install another hard drive to do this, but what about my iMac at home? or Mac Books, all our files would be on peripheral harddrives? does that slow down everything?

V Silly

February 6th, 2008
at 1:09pm

Yeow!! Great tip!!! Just what I needed as I am using my boot drive for apps only and have all my files on another 1TB internal drive. Having the home folder on the boot drive has been a PITA….
Thanks!!!!

unohoo

February 6th, 2008
at 1:19pm

Time Machine.

V Silly

February 6th, 2008
at 1:49pm

Ok…living dangerously…

I have a 320GB boot drive and 2 x 1TB drives on my Mac Pro, 1 for files and one for Time Machine.

Instead of having the home folder inside the drive for files, I made the actual physical volume be the home folder. Seems to be working. Is there any reason why making the home folder a physical volume instead of a nested folder is a bad idea?

I do notice that some apps are not finding the things they should now that I have moved the home folder. For example I had to tell VMWare Fusion where the disk image of the Virtual machine was. Time will tell what else may be a bit screwy, since I did this to an existing install….

Wish I had known about this a week ago when I got the new computer!!!

L. Kern

February 6th, 2008
at 4:42pm

Uh, no.
If you use Leopard, use that “other drive” for Time Machine, which is brilliant. If you’re using Tiger, use SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner and do incremental. Keeping track of “where things are” will be easier. Relocating your home folder is a recipe for disaster.

Steve

February 7th, 2008
at 1:29am

“… OS X uses 4 … folders.”

Really? I’ve got more than four directories [at the top level] on my installation, namely:

.fseventsd
.Spotlight-V100
.Trashes
.vol
Applications
bin
cores
Library
Network
private
sbin
System
Users
usr
Volumes
etc
home
net

Of course, some of those are hidden directories. But they’re there.

Darwin9

February 7th, 2008
at 4:34am

Moving the home folder to a 2nd drive is not just for backup and recovery purposes. The main reason for doing this on a machine with multiple internal hardrives is for performance. All hardrives in a Mac Pro have a dedicated connection to the Logic Board, so having the OS and data on different drives is a lot more efficient as both can be accessed separately without slowing each other down.

This tip was primarily a Mac Pro tip for Chris as he is going to be using multiple hardrives in his setup, although it can be done on any mac machine with a single drive split into multiple partitions.

Bluejade / Jack: I have not tried moving the home folder to an external drive, but i suspect it would cause problems if it ever became disconnected. So i would advise against it.

L. Kern: I can assure you i have been using this tip since the days of Panther on a production machine running Office, Adobe CS and Apple Pro Apps, and it has never resulted in a disaster of any kind. Time Machine still works just fine with this setup on Leopard, as do all other apps i have used in OS X. Apple would not have added this option if there was not a valid reason for doing so.

Darwin9

:)

Darwin9

February 7th, 2008
at 4:40am

Steve: The invisible files/folders you mention in the root directory are Unix and System files/folders, and as such should remain on the boot drive. I did not mention these folders as it would only have added complexity to the tip.

Most users have no reason to worry about these files, thats why they are invisible.

:)

Darwin9

Steven Dale

February 8th, 2008
at 2:54pm

My question is this: is it a good idea to do the following on my MacBook Pro:

1. Copy my Home folder to an external drive
2. Create a new user
3. Delete my original folder on my laptop and log in as the new user?

Reasons for doing this would be to free up space as my current Home folder uses almost 70GB of my drive and I need more to run XP for the two apps I need to run in XP via parallels. Also, I would be able to logon as my original user when at home and connected to my external drive.

Does this make any sense to anyone?

kiko

February 11th, 2008
at 2:15pm

I’ve had problems since I moved my home folder to a 2nd hard drive (G5 tower 10.4)
-System preferences refuse to remember Mouse/Keyboard shortcut settings after loggin back in. Also screen saver preferences are ignored and I’m forever stuck with bloddy “flurry” screensaver.

Tried all suggested tips (reinstallin System Prefs via pacifist) deleting .plist etc, but no joy.

In addition, keychain login is always locked (even after I unlock it in the keychain.app) so I need to enter my login everytime I launch mail.app

I wonder if anybody else has had the same problem and knows how to fixit …

Sean Ryan

February 13th, 2008
at 1:25pm

Thanks for this great tip Chris.

I just upgraded to Leopard and made the leap of having a separate drive for user data. The only problem I had was with separate accounts for my kids, I had to fix permissions for their user areas. I made them owners or their user areas but still gave myself (administrator account) read and write. Seems to be working fine so far.

Now I want to investigate stripping my day to day user account of administrative privileges and creating a dedicated admin account. I am thinking I might keep it’s user data on boot drive. What do you think Chris?

Ole

February 15th, 2008
at 4:45am

Hey,

this was excatly what I have been looking for, however, I am not able to log back in anymore. I am pretty sure it did everything just as you suggested, but regardless, I will have to get back in somehow. Since I can’t log on (tells me an error occured), is there a way to roll back from the commandline ( i get into a shell by reboot pressing ctrl+s)? Hope you won’t have me reinstall the whole system…

Thanks for your assistance…

Jemima

February 18th, 2008
at 7:27pm

Hey, I have just had the same problem as the guy above!

I can’t log back in, it just says an error occurred. Do you know how to fix this? I can get in via my MacBook via target disk mode, but nothing seems to be working.

Please, having followed your suggestions precisely, I really need your help.

Jack

February 23rd, 2008
at 7:10pm

Chris.
I followed the instructions in your article on How to move the Home Folder and you stated that you had not tried it.
I followed the instructions and it seems to work perfectly.
Thanks!!!

mattyohe

February 25th, 2008
at 3:13pm

You may not be able to login because your permissions did not get copied correctly, and you may not have “Ignore ownership permissions” checked on the Get Info of the FireWire drive.

Just moving the folder with the GUI is probably not the best way to do this.

I would recommend using the terminal and something more along the lines of:

ditto -V -rsrcFork /Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/user /Volumes/Firewire HD/Users/user

then

sudo chown -R user:staff /Volumes/Firewire HD/melvin/

mattyohe

February 25th, 2008
at 3:20pm

BTW: standard warnings apply, you can break your account if you don’t know what you are doing.

cinemarshall

March 3rd, 2008
at 4:35pm

hi…
i moved my home folder to my backup drive like the post says…and everything is working fine. BUT i’m having other (unrelated) tech issues with my mac mini and took it in to the apple store to have it checked out/fixed, and they won’t touch my computer because having your home folder on a backup drive is not supported by apple, even thought i bought their extended warranty.
can you please please please tell me how to move it back?
i tried on my own, but my home folder still points to the backup drive.

thanks. i can be emailed at cinemarshall@gmail.com if anyone can help. i need my computer checked out/fixed ASAP for school. =(
cinemarshall

Paul Manuel

March 10th, 2008
at 11:11pm

Is it possible to create a bootable clone from the above setup that contains the OS + Apps + Home folder?

Simon Chaung

March 16th, 2008
at 5:53pm

Dear Chris,

Thanks for your sharing for moving folders.
I did it and it works well on my Raid 0 system.

Thanks again.

Simon Chaung

Paul

March 28th, 2008
at 1:26pm

To Simon, above — A word of advice: I wouldn’t keep my home folder on a Raid 0 setup. Raid0 is highly susceptible to failure. Could be recipe for disaster.

Also, FYI, this tip only works with Leopard. For Tiger, you need to follow these instructions:

http://eshop.macsales.com/Reviews/Framework.cfm?page=Tips/mobilehome/mobile.html

Travis

April 3rd, 2008
at 1:41pm

I have been searching for an answer to a related question:

I want to create a ‘Media’ folder in my home folder, and move the Music, Movies, and Pictures folders into it.

I need to know how to change the location of the ’system’ folders so that OS X knows where to find them.

I know it can be done in Windows and Linux, so I’m sure it can be done in X, I just can’t find out how to go about it.

Thanks all,

-Travis

Ric

May 3rd, 2008
at 4:53pm

I had this configuration for a while on my previous setup (a G5 tower with two HDs) and I liked the performance and security. However, I did have some issues with Acrobat Pro/Distiller that were solved by reverting back to the standard setup. I have yet to try this with my Mac Pro/Leopard system but I may at some point when I have some extra time. I do a lot of work with Photoshop and Final Cut (huge applications working on huge files), so spreading the joy across a couple of disks always beneficial for me. However, I’d caution folks who do this to double-check and make sure that files/data are going to the correct version of the user’s home folder. Also, using ditto and chown from the terminal is, IMHO, a safer way to go.

Nice writeup!
Ric

Andrew Bradbury

May 11th, 2008
at 10:59am

Is it possible to host some mailboxes in Mail on one disk and others on another. I have a work laptop, I like to keep my work emails on the laptop, but I would like to keep my personal emails on a USB memory stick. With Eudora it was easy, I just moved the preferences and all the personal mailboxes to the USB stick. I haven’t been able to find a way to do with Mail. Also, I would like the attachments from both accounts to go to different folders

Any ideas?

thanks

clay

June 2nd, 2008
at 8:50pm

how do I change my screensaver to something other than freaking “flurry”?

Julien Etienne

June 5th, 2008
at 1:43pm

Hi Chris and thanks for this fantastic tip. It really helped me to get my mac more secured and more at my convenience.

Ahriman

June 27th, 2008
at 2:05pm

Hey guys,

I just got a 500Gb Firewire external HD and I’m researching on the best way to use it. At the beginning I wanted to move everything but the System Folder to the external so Tiger could run from the internal (40Gb). Upon reading posts and articles here and there, seems like that would not be advisable.
I’m guessing the best way to go is to move all my Pics (including the iPhoto library), Music (same case for iTunes), Movies and Docs.
Should move the entire folders to the external and then place aliases of each folder back in the Home in the internal?
Thanks in advance for the suggestions!

thomas

July 11th, 2008
at 12:35pm

Hi, i can’t right click or ctrl+click on my admin user. nothing comes up!

I varified that my right click and ctrl click works on other files.

any ideas.
Thanks,
Thomas

Adobe - Adobe AIR General Discussions

July 21st, 2008
at 3:59am

[...] the main document storage and for the User directory. Please see here for an example to what I mean:http://chris.pirillo.com/2008/02/06/how-to-move-the-home-folder-in-os-x-and-why/I last night did a complete fresh reinstall of leopard so that both the boot drive was default for [...]

William

September 22nd, 2008
at 11:52am

@Ahriman: I did that with my iTunes folder some years ago and have never had a problem with it. On the internal drive, it’s just an alias inside the Music folder, pointing to a partitioned FireWire drive with the actual iTunes files on it.

Gro

October 8th, 2008
at 4:43am

Hi, I hit the same problem as OLE, “logging in to the account failed because an error occurred”.

I guess this is because the permission for home directory didn’t get copied correctly. I got to step 6, changed the location of the home directory and now can’t log in. I didn’t delete the original so if someone could tell be how to return the location of the home directory back to the original location without needing to log in as a user that’d be fantastic.

Cheers,
Steve

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