M1 Mac Mini: Moving Home Directory to External Drive: Storage Double-Counts "Documents" in Calculation

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M1 Mac Mini: Moving Home Directory to External Drive: Storage Double-Counts "Documents" in Calculation

I recently moved my home directory to an external drive to save space on my internal drive, using this tutorial: https://www.lifewire.com/move-macs-home-folder-new-location-2260157. However, the "Documents" section of the storage tab under Macintosh HD shows file sizes that are found on the external drive. This means that whenever I add a 1 GB file to the external drive, the "Documents" section of the storage tab under Macintosh HD will also increase by 1 GB, and the computer will register that as space taken up. This essentially means that once I fill up my external drive to the same capacity of my internal drive, the internal drive will show to be out of disk space.

Apple states that "Documents: Contains files in your home folder that aren’t included in other categories, such as Pages documents and PDFs." (See used and available storage space on your Mac - Apple Support). Does that mean if your home folder is on your external drive, then it count's towards 'used' space on your Macintosh HD? If so, then that defeats the whole purpose of moving your home folder to an external drive. Please help me understand what's going here, and if this is the desired behavior. Thanks!

Posted on Oct 10, 2022 1:28 AM

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Answer 1

Oct 10, 2022 4:00 AM in response to Phillsng

As far as I can tell, you select "Documents" (or any other option in that sidebar, really, Mail, iCloud Drive, etc), the title of the window shows the boot drive, but the contents include everything available.

In other words, there is no assumption that the contents are actually stored in that same drive. "Documents" means documents currently accessible (in any mounted drives).

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Answer 2

Phillsng Author

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Oct 10, 2022 10:07 AM in response to Luis Sequeira1

Hi Luis, thanks for your reply.

If I understand your point correctly, "Documents" (which is only listed on Macintosh HD) searches for all files (that aren’t included in other categories) on ALL drives and then interprets it as used space on Macintosh HD?

The amount of avaliable space on a disk is important for many computer functions. For example, software updates, downloads, applications, etc. could fail if there isn't enough storage avaliable. Wouldn't that also mean once I reach 251 GB (or the same capacity as Macintosh HD) on my external SSD for files that belong to the "Documents" category (i.e. PDF's), then Macintosh HD will assume that all the storage capacity is used, stop functioning correctly, and ask the user to take corrective action (i.e. start deleting files to release storage capacity)?

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