How can I transfer applications from my Mac mini's SSD to an external hard drive

It's very quick and easy if you follow these instructions.

Partition a physical disk in Disk Utility on Mac – Apple Support (UK)

Alternatively if you want to watch a video, do a search on Youtube.

Quick & Easy Partitioning Video Tutorials

You can install certain applications in a location of your choice, including an external drive. It depends on whether or not the application installer supports doing it. And you have to remember to keep the external drive connected at all times. For apps already installed, you would have to uninstall them first, then reinstall them to the external drive. Note, you cannot move Apple applications that come preinstalled with macOS. Also, Mail & Dropbox files bascially cannot be moved; nor can iPhone/iPad backups (at least not without extreme difficulty).

Be aware, however, that application size on disk is not usually the problem. For example, I have a large number of apps including PS, LR, CaptureOne, DavinciPro, PortraitStudioPro, Screenflow and a host of others and in aggregate they only take up 43GB disk space.

The problem is generally user data files. Move as much of that off to the external drive as you can. Start by moving the library files for apps you may be using, like Photos, Music, TV, Final Cut, etc., even your LR catalog - they often take up quite a bit of space.

Last night I was getting ready for bed and didn't have time to write much.

So I will now tell you about my setup (to the accompanied groans of those who have heard it countless times before!)

I bought a cheap (£60) Crucial 1 TB USB 3.0 SSD, formatted it as APFS and installed Sonoma on it so it has all the macOS apps.

I now boot and use my mini from that so the internal SSD gets no use (or wear) at all.

"But what about the comparatively slow speed of the USB 3.0 SSD?" I hear you say.

Well I too was a bit worried about that but in actual practice the M2 mini is just as fast as using the internal SSD . . . the results of Geekbench tests and real world editing in Final Cut Pro and Da Vinci Resolve are identical (within the usual margin of error) with the internal SSD.

If you are interested I can give you details of the process, which is very quick and simple.

FWIW, just moving apps like Lightroom and Photoshop to an external drive will not be of much help. Those apps and others like them keep massive cache files in your ~/Library/ApplicationSupport and other folders buried in ~/Library. These can occupy a very much larger space on your internal drive than the apps themselves. While I have given up on the Adobe stuff years ago, even though you can opt for some those caches to be external, there are still a ton kept in the afore mentioned locations.

The problem stems from the fact that you bought a computer with insufficient storage for your needs but you can get around that. For anything other than simple casual use (browsing, email, home budgeting, etc.), 256 GB is simply not enough storage.

My solution was a 1TB OWC Thunderbolt drive set up as an external boot drive. The speed is very fast. It is much faster than any USB solution with the exception of USB4. This is especially useful if you are working with large images with lots of layers and restoring the "undos". I do a lot of photography work (not with Adobe stuff as I dumped them years ago) and I notice very little if any speed difference between internal and external.

Ian R. Brown wrote:

"But what about the comparatively slow speed of the USB 3.0 SSD?" I hear you say.

"Comparatively" is absolutely the right word here, not "slow."

I, too, am doing this via USB 3.0. Well, full disclosure, it's my iMac that is USB 3.0 (5 Gbps)... my external drive enclosures are USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gbps) ... but the SSDs inside them are SATA (6 Gbps). Even so, it's wicked fast. And it blows away my former setup using FW800 drives.

What's important is the entirety of the setup; the actual transmission rate is limited by the slowest component. Even if I had an iMac that supported USB 3.1 Gen 2, I would still not get speeds over 6 Gbps with SATA SSDs inside the enclosures.

woodmeister50 wrote:

My solution was a 1TB OWC Thunderbolt drive set up as an external boot drive. The speed is very fast. It is much faster than any USB solution with the exception of USB4.

Would you tell us the exact model of your OWC Thunderbolt unit, the drive that is inside and the Mac you are using it with. Thanks.

I'm concerned whenever anyone partitions a drive. It is generally a very bad idea to partition any drive because sooner or later the user realizes one or more partitions don't have enough room. Plus many people try to split their backup drive into a backup partition and a data partition which is an even worse idea because if the data on that data partition is important it needs to be backed up as well. Backing it up to the other partition is not a backup because if the drive fails, you lose the original data & the backup copy.

If you absolutely need a drive to be partitioned, then these days you should format the external drive with the APFS file system and create a new APFS volume which does separate out the data to a different volume which is mounted separately from the others, but the file system of the other APFS volume still shares the storage pool with the other APFS volumes within the same APFS Container so both AFPS volumes have full access to the storage area of the drive so you don't need to specify any size limitations like you must do with a partition.

I also do not recommend placing your applications on the external drive even if the application supports it. Who knows whether that app will still support that configuration after the next app update/upgrade, or after the next macOS update patch or system upgrade. I find that even if an app may work from another location, that app may have some features that will not function properly unless the app is in the Applications folder...one app I use works fine, but will not update itself automatically unless the app is placed into the Applications folder.

I sure hope you have dedicated backup drives that are only used for backups and hopefully you have more than one backup drive.

+1

I agree that partitioning has gone the way of the Dodo and that 2 Volumes should be created on the SSD.

The only time I have created an extra volume was when I wanted to test a new macOS for bugs etc. on my iMac before installing it on the main HDD.

I don't quite understand what you are saying Martin. Are you booting the iMac from the external?

To digress and delve into the past, I don't know whether you remember a particular chap on the Final Cut Express forum around 2005 - 2009?

His forum name had some weird numbers in it and he was one of the top contributors. He was always slagging off his employers saying what a rubbish job he had and I am pretty sure he was answering the questions when he should have been working busily for them!

He was also quite nifty at creating effects for me and others.

Well sometime during the aforementioned period his MacBook hard drive died and due to lack of cash he said he was running it from a plugin HDD . . . possibly USB 2.0 or FW 500 in those days.

I didn't understand such things and always wondered what sort of poor performance he would be experiencing running FCE on a setup like that.

JJ548 wrote:

I have a Mac Mini and it only has a 256gb internal SSD which fills up rapidly with the applications and programs I need to run, I’m a photographer so I have PS and LR along side topaz suite of programs

It is not the Applications that take up a lot of Disk Space.

It is the User Libraries for those App's that consumes the most Disk Space.

what I want to do is keep the SSD for boot up and the like but have all the applications and what not moved to an external 2tb hard drive that I have partitioned in half.

It is best to leave macOS and all of the App's on the internal drive.

Then move the larger Libraries for those App's to an External drive to free up internal disk space.

can anyone advise how to do this and provide necessary instructions?

Moving the PS and LR Libraries works pretty much the same as moving your Photos, Music and Movie Libraries.

Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support

Change where your music files are stored on Mac - Apple Support

Move your iMovie for Mac library - Apple Support

I also suggest using two or more external drives to protect those moved Libraries.

One external drive to hold the moved Libraries and one or more to backup the Libraries on the first.

Partitioning an external drive into half, is not necessary or recommended and just complicates things.

MartinR wrote:

woodmeister50 wrote:

My solution was a 1TB OWC Thunderbolt drive set up as an external boot drive. The speed is very fast. It is much faster than any USB solution with the exception of USB4.

Would you tell us the exact model of your OWC Thunderbolt unit, the drive that is inside and the Mac you are using it with. Thanks.

OWC Envoy Pro SX with my 2020 M1 MacBook Air which has a 512GB SSD.