Moving Home folder to different HDD From Mac OSX Snow Leopard via Terminal?

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Moving Home folder to different HDD From Mac OSX Snow Leopard via Terminal?

Hi all, I know you can help so here goes. I want to move my home Folder to a separate drive from my OSX Snow Leopard using Terminal. Could someone tell me the syntax to do this? I believe I use the 'ditto' command but I'm unsure as to the complete syntax. I think it's as follows:

ditto/Users/yourname/Volumes/drivename/yourname

in my case that would be:

ditto/Users/deniswilliams/Volumes/"Mac Two HD"/deniswilliams

Can you tell me if I"m correct please1

regards Denis

Mac Pro (2 x 2.66GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon) Ver:1.1., Mac OS X (10.6.4), 10GB RAM; HD4870; 23" Apple HD Display; 24' Dell U2410 Display; 5TB HDD space

Posted on Feb 22, 2011 5:12 AM

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Answer 1

Feb 22, 2011 5:17 AM in response to Denisimo

Unless you are dying to use Terminal, there are two procedure to do this job with no Terminal commands at all:

http://chris.pirillo.com/how-to-move-the-home-folder-in-os-x-and-why/

http://jcsenterprises.com/Japamacs_Page/Blog/00E03B83-1ADA-406E-A940-396D39F598E A.html

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Answer 2

Feb 22, 2011 5:41 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

And several that use Terminal, with and without the ditto command:

http://www.macmeisters.com/~damien/moveusers/

http://www.macworld.com/article/1492/2002/06/osxsecrets.html

http://macosx.com/forums/mac-os-x-system-mac-software/19461-moving-users-folder- another-drive-partition.html

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1358159

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=6388983

N.B. use of niutil is not needed for 10.5 and 10.6 -- Control-click on the User Account in
System Preferences > Accounts ...
... to reveal the Advanced options, including changing the Home Folder location for that User.

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Answer 3

Denisimo Author

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114 points

Feb 22, 2011 7:30 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Thank you Grant, The info is really helpful. I moved my home folder using the ditto command and the syntax in my original post at the terminal when I was using Leopard back in 2007, ditto being used to preserve the correct permissions. However from your information it would appear that this is no longer required with Snow Leopard 10.6.6. By the look of some of the examples on your links though, it looks like moving the home folder via Terminal is now a lot more demanding so thanks again for the simple alternative.

Regards Denis 🙂

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Answer 4

Feb 22, 2011 8:09 AM in response to Denisimo

Support for changing Home Folder location in Accounts is available in 10.5 and 10.6.

Some of those Terminal version are older than that.

Another issue that sometimes comes up is leaving the Home for the System Owner (presuming that is NOT your day-to-day login account) on the Boot Drive so that you can still log in if the drive with the relocated Home folders has trouble.

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Answer 5

Denisimo Author

Level 1

114 points

Feb 22, 2011 9:48 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Yes I did note some of the links were old and as you state leaving the option of logging in on the system drive (which I do as a matter of course) makes a lot of sense.

Thanks again Denis 🙂

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Answer 6

Mar 16, 2011 6:59 AM in response to Denisimo

great info guys....thanks for posting.

I will probably do this this weekend.

how do I create the admin user on the OS boot drive?

and can I manually put data on the OS boot drive?

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Answer 7

Mar 17, 2011 2:40 PM in response to Community User

how do I create the admin user on the OS boot drive?

That's what it wants to do by default. If you leave the Users folder and the main admin account behind on the Boot drive, you can move all the other Accounts (one by one) off to another drive to get the performance boost.

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