Comments on: How to Move the Home Folder in OS X – and Why

By: Glenno

Glenno — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:08:02 +0000

Simon above mentions having a problem doing this with an EXTERNAL drive, but Darwin9 had recommended against that earlier, anyway.

We moved the Home Folder on one of our Mac Pro’s to a second *internal* HD — actually a RAID 0 — about a year ago, and have had no problems that we know of thus far. Snow Leopard updated just fine.

Thanks for the tip.

By: Jon

Jon — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 21:23:59 +0000

Would this work if you moved it to a partition that was FAT32-formatted? I’d like to set up a FAT32 partition that I could get to from both Bootcamp and Mac OS.

By: Simon

Simon — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 10:45:03 +0000

Hi Chris,

In brief, the tip sounds great but from my experiences I’d strongly recommend against it. I did exactly as you suggested three months ago and all was fine yet this morning I’ve had endless trouble because my Mac ‘lost’ the home directory and went back to a default user set up and then, when I re-directed it using the account preferences panel, it completely lost any users’ home directory and I was locked out of my Mac. It’s taken a morning and a long phone call with one of Apple Care’s senior engineers to sort it out.

The bottom line from Apple is the solution you’re suggesting is intended for large networks of Macs (such as in colleges) where for security you may wish to store user details on an X-serve elsewhere. The Apple Care guy said don’t do it on your home mac with external drives as it’s not stable enough and that he didn’t think it was covered under Apple Care support if you did.

My issue was not having space for large amounts of MP3 and photo data on the local HD, in which case there are ways of pointing iTunes, iPhoto etc. to external drives. I understand your reasoning for keeping valuable data separate to the OS, but I’m trusting to Time Machine (on a second external HD) to look after that for me.

Thanks for posting anyway. It’s always good to share the knowledge, even if we later discover there might be loopholes to plug.

Best regards from the North of England,
Simon

By: RB

RB — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 16:40:24 +0000

I just completed doing this yesterday with OS 10.5.5. Most things went smoothly. The only odd occurrence was that dragging and dropping the home folder did not result in its contents being copied. I dragged and dropped each of the items in the home folder to the new home folder and they were successfully copied.

After changing the path to the new home folder/drive and restarting things have behaved normally. I have not yet updated to OS 10.5.6. I have made a backup of the new home folder/drive and will update the OS after I have a chance to back up the new boot drive as well.

By: blankgm

blankgm — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 14:47:58 +0000

The concept use to work, however the Apple OS no longer supports it according to the Apple Tech Support line. After relocating my /user director and applying the 10.5 upgrade, my users began experiencing no end of problems from failed patches to the /user home directories being set to “Read Only”. Upon contacting Apple I was informed directly by their tech support line that OSX 10.5 DOES NOT support relocation of the /user directory path and that it must be on the boot drive. Their recommendation is that all the user data can be redirected to other drives by either application preferences pointing to the application location or through logical links. When I attempted, as a UNIX professional, to explain why this flies in the face of the precepts of the UNIX operating system – their technical support was – well – unconcerned.

By: PB

PB — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 12:37:50 +0000

I think Ahriman and William have the better approach for your average user (me). Keep it simple and have it make sense in your head. Less room for trouble and user error that way and you keep all your documents (save for the space hogs (photos, tunes, movies) in one place so you can make clones and offsite clones with ease. You can back up your your disk space hogs on the separate drive(s) as you choose separately, since those BUs will take much longer to execute.

I don’t know about any performance enhancements from moving the home folder but I have pretty old G4 running Tiger and it seems plenty fast.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 06:12:18 +0000

I followed this procedure so my home folder is now on my 2nd drive. Here’s what confuses me: My Home user folder (with the house icon) is on HD2 but my Users folder (with the user icon) is still on HD1, and in that Users folder is (an old copy?) of my Home folder (which I already copied to HD 2). Does the Users folder have to stay on the 1st drive? If not, how would I reassign it to my 2nd drive?

Thanks

By: unqualifiedmeddler

unqualifiedmeddler — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 08:52:27 +0000

Thanks for the article. However, I’ve made something of an error…

I moved the library folder to a server – of course the server is not mounted at the time the machine starts up so I can’t, now log in to the machine itself. I get the same error others have talked about above.

Is there a way I can restore the home folder location in the user account to the original, local folder?

I know you gave fair warning and this is a clear case of PEBCAK but, if you have any suggestions, I’d be glad to hear ‘em!

Thanks

By: Mac Pro Hard Drives - Forums | MacLife

Mac Pro Hard Drives - Forums | MacLife — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 02:36:04 +0000

[...] this article which might, or not, be of some relevance.How to Move the Home Folder in OS X – and chris.pirillo.com/2008/02/06/how … x-and-why/ Computers never do what you want them to do; only what you tell them to do. Offline [...]

By: Gro

Gro — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 11:43:36 +0000

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

By: William

William — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 18:52:43 +0000

@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.

By: Adobe - Adobe AIR General Discussions

Adobe - Adobe AIR General Discussions — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 10:59:30 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: Mac Owners Support Group :: View topic - Moving Your Home Folder (Directory)

Mac Owners Support Group :: View topic - Moving Your Home Folder (Directory) — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 22:06:55 +0000

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By: thomas

thomas — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:35:20 +0000

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

By: Ahriman

Ahriman — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:05:12 +0000

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!