Mac OS X: Move home folder from SSD to another disk
by lekke on June 30th, 2011.
Mac OS X: Move home folder from SSD to another disk
DON’T DO IT! Do something similar, but way better.
SSDs are so fast compared to traditional disks that an increasing number of people is buying them just for running their OSX & apps. When they chose to move their home folder (full of docs, photos and movies) to a different drive, what they fail to realize is that there’s something in the home folder that should be left on the SSD: ~/Library. It’s a collection of settings, caches and support files for those apps we want starting up faster.
And that’s not all. With a big iTunes library, you might want to have the contents of ~/Music/iTunes/ on the SSD too (excluding “iTunes Music”, of course, where the actual music files are). Why? So iTunes loads faster and you never ever see its icon bounce.
There’s a really simple way to do all this and you don’t even have to logout once. You won’t move your home folder, but will move most of its contents away and then use symbolic links to point to the new location. Symbolic links have to be made in the Terminal, and you can remember this syntax:
ln -s <where-to-link-to> <what-to-call-it>
So let’s do this in a form of a checklist:
0. Quit all apps, stop your Dropbox etc.
1. Use Finder to open your home folder. Select everything except for “Library” and drag it to the new storage drive. Finder will take care of all the resource forks and HFS data.
2. When the copying is done, delete from your home folder everything except for ~/Library and ~/Music/iTunes
4. Open Terminal. You should be in your home folder. Now start linking: ln -s /Volumes/StorageDriveName/Downloads Downloads
You have your first symbolic link. Look at it in Finder.
5. Now do this for all the other directories you’ve moved: Documents, Movies, Pictures, Sites… Torrents, Dropbox etc.
Do everything except for the Music.
6. Finished with #5? Now Music. Inside Music/iTunes/ delete “iTunes Music”. Either from Finder or the Terminal, doesn’t matter. Now create a symbolic link to this “iTunes Music” on the storage:
cd Music/iTunes
ln -s /Volumes/StorageDriveName/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music iTunes\ Music
7. Done!
You now have a home folder on the SSD, containing all the app settings and your iTunes Library data sans the actual files. Everything else is hardlinked to the storage drive.
The best part is: you don’t have to change a thing in your daily workflow. Everything is how you’re used to having it.
Oh and don’t forget to run your Dropbox again.
DON’T DO IT! Do something similar, but way better.
SSDs are so fast compared to traditional disks that an increasing number of Mac heads is buying them just for running their OSX & apps. When they chose to move their home folder (full of docs, photos and movies) to a different drive, what they fail to realize is that there’s something in the home folder that should be left on the SSD: ~/Library. It’s a collection of settings, caches and support files for those apps we want starting up faster.
And that’s not all. With a big iTunes library, you might want to have the contents of ~/Music/iTunes/ on the SSD too (excluding “iTunes Music”, of course, where the actual music files are). Why? So iTunes loads faster and you never ever see its icon bounce.
There’s a really simple way to do all this and you don’t even have to logout once. You won’t move your home folder, but will move most of its contents away and then use symbolic links to point to the new location. Symbolic links have to be made in the Terminal, and you can remember this syntax: ln -s <where-to-link-to> <what-to-call-it>
So let’s do this in a form of a checklist with 7 easy steps:
0. Quit all apps, stop your Dropbox etc.
1. Use Finder to open your home folder. Select everything except for “Library” and drag it to the new storage drive. Finder will take care of all the resource forks and HFS data.
2. When the copying is done, delete from your home folder everything except for ~/Library and ~/Music/iTunes
4. Open Terminal. You should be in your home folder. Now start linking: ln -s /Volumes/StorageDisk/Downloads Downloads
You have your first symbolic link. Look at it in Finder.
5. Now do this for all the other directories you’ve moved: Documents, Movies, Pictures, Sites… Torrents, Dropbox etc. Do everything except for the Music.
6. Finished with #5? Now Music. Inside Music/iTunes/ delete “iTunes Music”. Either from Finder or the Terminal, doesn’t matter. Now create a symbolic link to this “iTunes Music” on the storage:
cd Music/iTunes
ln -s “/Volumes/StorageDisk/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music” “iTunes Music”
You now have a home folder on the SSD, containing all the app settings and your iTunes Library data sans the actual files. Everything else is hardlinked to the storage drive, perfectly in place.
The best part is: you don’t have to change a thing in your daily workflow. Everything is how you’re used to having it.
Don’t forget to run your Dropbox again.
A note of warning:
When you erase folders from their original location, Finder sidebar doesn’t use the original folder icons anymore. Also, after Verifying secondary drive, shortcuts in the sidebar are gone, so you have to re-drag them after each secondary disk unmount operation.
My OSX 10.6.8 wouldn’t allow step 2.
“Desktop” can’t be modified or deleted because it’s required by Mac OS X
Marten you are quite right! It’s an omission on my part, I left my Desktop folder on the SSD on purpose, and forgot to exclude it in step 2.
I ve found it better to just relocate the iTunes Music folder through iTunes preferences than to symlink to that location. When I had it symlinked, iTunes did not delete songs when I removed them from the library (and made sure to click to remove the file too, not just the reference). Changing the iTunes Music path directly to the HDD through iTunes preferences fixed that.
Hi there ,
i tried to move the Document / movies / download/pictures folders from the SSD to the other HDD in my iMac but ..
i got this message
“Documents” can’t be modified or deleted because it’s required by Mac OS X.
all folders are from my Home – under Users
how can i sove it ?
Very energetic post, I liked that a lot. Will there be a part 2?
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So I was trying to do this, doesn’t seem to work anymore?
Lion will not allow you to delete the folders. If they aren’t delete all the commands to is put an alias to the other folder inside of the folder. But this doesn’t work correctly.
Try to do it as root user and while I can delete the folders, I can’t create the symbolic links correctly. Still searching for an answer …. any clues?
Instead of relocating all iTunes Media check out TuneSpan in Mac App Store.
I keep Music on my SSD, but have bigger videos files on my normal HD.
iTunes library files stay on SSD for fast access.
use: sudo rm -r xxxxxx to delete the folders.
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I think cloning a Mac disk is the best option to migrate from older Mac to new one. It carries all the data and applications with it and proves a great rescue at the time of hard drive failure.
The cloning tool I have used is Stellar Drive Clone.
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