symbolic link to books doesn't work
I am trying to create a symbolic link to
/Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/<username>/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks from my External but it doesn't work
tried via terminal and ln -s and in finder via alias but when starting Books it can't find the books stored on the external.
Any pointers please. The paths are correct.
Tia
macos 15.7.2.
Mac mini (M4, 2024)
That's never going to work. Those folders in "Containers" are internal app data. You can't replace them with symbolic links. They have special privacy protections.
What you can do instead is export your books to your external drive. You can double-click them from there just like any document.
That's never going to work. Those folders in "Containers" are internal app data. You can't replace them with symbolic links. They have special privacy protections.
What you can do instead is export your books to your external drive. You can double-click them from there just like any document.
You may need to grant Books "Full Disk Access" in System Settings->Privacy & Security.
mjcm_nl wrote:
Thanks yes, I agree, on Windows that was easily possible with mklink but now in mac it isn't. Shame
Security. Making an app stay in its space and not easily access stuff outside its space.
While Apple is trustworthy, not all apps you may install are.
mjcm_nl wrote:
Forget to add, when going in Finder when clicking on the symbolic link it opens the correct directory on the external.
Any pointers would be really appreciated
Ps: The error in books is "Cannot open, .... it's formatted incorrectly or it's not in a format ...."
I can't provide a solution but possibly relevant is that such links sometimes do not work with Mac software for other applications as well. One example: people have tried to use symbolic links to enable backups of iPhones to external drives and that does not work either (although it seems that it should). It might be something to do with the internal working of some of these Apple apps, which might be a challenge for us ordinary users to discern and try to "fix."
I agree what you are saying, but this Apple's own books app or finder, in case of having iPhone's backup be automatically be written to external's
At least we should get the option to make it happen, but Apple wants us to buy bigger Internals or more cloud storage. Oke and NO i won't fill in feedback to Apple because I know that is not going to help a bit. Filled in a dozen feedback forms about the search function in Music not updating the "column browser results" and nothing has changed. But oke
Thanks Guys for all the replies, it's clear it's a lost cause and I am going to export them, and manually moving my iPhone backups
Thanks @Steven626 for saving me headaches the iPhone Backups also don't work with a symlink.
You could always just put macOS on the external disk and boot from the external disk.
Forget to add, when going in Finder when clicking on the symbolic link it opens the correct directory on the external.
Any pointers would be really appreciated
Ps: The error in books is "Cannot open, .... it's formatted incorrectly or it's not in a format ...."
Thanks, but unfortunately NO Dice.
Same error.
aha thanks
Thanks yes, I agree, on Windows that was easily possible with mklink but now in mac it isn't. Shame
Books cannot find content after symbolic link
