stikygum wrote:
Yeah, I'm really low on space, so I'm going about a bunch of different consolidating options. But I mainly posted my main question to help me understand what 'stuff' is in the User and Shared folders and whether or not they act like an Alias, in order to help me make an informed decision what is best for my needs.
They are not aliases; it is a hierarchy, and there is intentional duplication at different levels. This is a feature.
First thing is that Users and Shared are at different levels. Users is at the top level, but Shared is one level inside Users, at the same level as any other user account you have created.
Therefore, if you delete the Users folder, you delete all user accounts, which means you delete all personal data. OS X probably won't even let you delete the Users folder unless you start up from a different hard drive, because you can't delete your user account while you are running in it.
Now, more about the hierarchy. The intentional duplication is so that documents and software can exist for individual users or all users. For example, there are multiple Applications folders:
Hard Drive\Applications - applications any user can see, installed at the system level
Hard Drive\Users\username1\Applications = applications only that user can see
Hard Drive\Users\username2\Applications = applications only that user can see
In the same way, there are multiple Preferences, Cookies, Application Support, etc. folders at different levels, for the same reasons.
If you do not know what you are doing and you delete one of these folders that "looks like a duplicate" you could cripple some essential part of your system or your account. That is why people are telling you not to do this.
The Shared folder is there because if you are in one user account you are prevented from seeing the files inside other user accounts. (Because you don't want other accounts to be able to see your personal data.) If you want to share files with others in your house using the same Mac, that's a problem. But the Shared folder solves this. if you want some files to be accessible to all users, like some photos or music, just put them in the Shared folder and now anyone with an account on that computer can see those shared files.
The reason shared files are not simply stored at the top level is because everything above the Users folder is supposed to be reserved for the system. User-specific are supposed to stay in the Users folder. That is why they put the Shared folder in there.
If you are not using the Shared folder and are just eyeing it because you want to free up some disk space, well, it probably won't help to delete it. Because if you are not using the Shared folder, it is probably not taking up much space, even though you see stuff in there. And if there is stuff in there taking up space, first figure out if someone put it there for a reason before you delete it.