How to move Home folder to another internal drive in macOS Ventura?

Change the name of your macOS user account and home folder - Apple Support

Follow all of the steps exactly and heed all of the warnings. You can make your Mac unusable.

First, copy your current home folder to the other drive. Then, log out of your current user and log into the other admin account.

You don’t need to change the short user name or the name of the home folder. Where it talks about setting the name of the path to the home folder, step 7, set the full path to the copied home folder. It will be something like /Volumes/drivename/folder/username

If you had to create a new admin user because you didn’t have another one, do not delete it. If that drive doesn’t come up ready when you login, MOS will create a new home directory on your internal drive. You will need to use the admin user to reset it to that other drive folder.

While it is technically possible to change/move your home folder to a different location or drive, it is not generally advisable to do so. There is potential for messing things up in the process or later.

To avoid using the home folder for personal content at all, I have always used a dedicated data drive, separate from the system drive. In the same vein as what Old Toad mentioned in his post, I create the following folders on the data drive. In the case of Music, Pictures, Movies & Downloads, I also point the respective apps to the new locations (ditto with all 3rd party apps that have default save locations in the Home folder).

• Documents
• Downloads
• Movies
• Music
• Pictures

I have many other data folders also on the data drive. I just don't use the Home folder.

An easier way to do essentially the same is to:

1 - create folders on the EHD that mirror the folder on your boot drive that you want to move. Name the folders Docments-2, Pictures-2, etc.

2 - copy the files in the original folders to the respective folders on the EHD. Verify that the copy was successful before deleting any files from the original folders.

3 - remove the original folders from the Finder's sidebar by dragging them out of the sidebar.

4 - replace them with the -2 folders by dragging them into the Finder's sidebar from the EHD.

I've kept the Desktop, Library and Applications where they were originally but the others are on my EHD. I kept the originals in the sidebar for the screenshot.

Just some food for thought.

Technically it is possible to do what you want just as @Barney-15E described with their instructions. However, be aware that a simple macOS update patch may break things. This has happened several times in the past especially when macOS 12.x Monterey was the current OS, plus I believe even upgrading to Ventura broke that setup again. Resolving things was not completely straight forward or obvious as it took a few people several days to fix it themselves. If you do go this route, then you definitely want to keep one admin user account located on the boot drive so you can log in & attempt to fix things if the setup becomes broken.

Are you willing to deal with this including the system downtime & the time it may take you to research & figure out how to fix it?

I'm not certain, but I believe some people may have had issues restoring Time Machine backups to systems where the home user folder had been located on a secondary drive. Just make sure your backup solution will work during restoration....both in the modified setup & with the home folder located in its default location on the boot drive. Also confirm the backups are actually backing up the files located on the external home folder.

One option is just to place the data directly on the second drive which is only used as a pure data drive, or making the adjustments such as the others have mentioned. Another option, would be to purchase a larger boot drive so you can keep everything on a single drive, or at least have enough Free space on the boot drive for the workload, but offload older projects to the secondary data drive.