Move all users home folders to a separate drive

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Move all users home folders to a separate drive

Hi there,

I work in a lab with 9 iMacs which have solid state boot drives and secondary 2TB drives. These computers are connected to the school's network so that the students can login with their Active Directory accounts and the computer will create a new home folder for them. When we got the computers we made the mistake of letting OS X create the user accounts on the SSD rather than the 2TB drive, and as you can guess they've filled up pretty quickly. My question has three parts:

1. How can I configure OS X to create home folders on the secondary drive from now on

2. How can I move the each user's home folder to the second drive (without messing up permissions)

3. How can I point the user's account to the new home folder location for all the users

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Erik

iMac, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.1)

Posted on Dec 17, 2012 11:17 AM

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Answer 1

jcucdm Author

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Jan 7, 2013 9:32 AM in response to jcucdm

So far I've answered a few of my own questions while working on this problem:

For question 1: According to Apple customer support there is not a supported way to change where the home folders are created. It is possible to do it manually but this would take ages for all 200 or so users and it would need to be done each time a new user signs on to the computer.

For question 2: I used the cp command to copy each user's folder to the drive with the -p option to preserve permissions.

cp -p -R /Users /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD\ 2/User\ Data\ 2012\ Fall/

For question 3: I've created a basic apple script app to act as a shortcut to the user's archived files and placed it in the default user template.

This is the best solution I've found, however when I was testing my 'archive' command it did not behave the same way when there were already files present in the archive location. Since we will probably have to do this each semester the next step is to have the new files added to the archive without the old ones being affected. I am not sure how to do this with cp, and I will probably open a new thread with just this question specifically.

If you do know how to copy with cp -r without changing the destination directory structure please let me know here.

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