How do I move or change home folder in OS X Mavericks? (re-post)

Apple's support documents on the subject are outdated and cumbersome.

There are two better alternatives to consider:

Niel's post here: How to change name of home folder

and the following:

Apple Support Communities contributor Pondini found an astonishingly simple way to accomplish what you seek. etresoft distilled that information into the following User Tip:

Changing user account short name

Note that he writes it has been tested on Mountain Lion but the procedure appears sound and should work equally well with Mavericks.

Back up your system before doing either one.

joe3ply wrote:

Would you have an updated procedure that talks about moving the home folder from the boot drive to an external drive?

Not yet, but it's on the list. I presume you want to relocate your Home folder to a volume separate from the boot volume, and I have not yet attempted that with Mavericks.

Joe, FYI I was able to successfully move a User's Home folder to another volume (a USB flash drive), was able to log in and use it, and to subsequently delete the original Home folder from the boot volume. I believe that what you propose.

The procedure was unchanged in Mavericks from previous OS X versions. What I did was create a new User in System Preferences, after which I logged out and logged in to that new User. I performed basic configuration, created some documents, etc. After that I logged out, logged in under my usual account, and dragged that User's folder to another volume. Then, I used Users & Groups "Advanced Options" to point to the new Home folder's location. After that, I restarted the Mac using OS X Recovery to reset that user's Home Folder Permissions and ACLs since permissions problems with the copied Home folder would otherwise result.

After quitting OS X Recovery I was able to log in to the User account established on the USB flash drive, and was able to use it more or less the same way without any surprises. Safari, iTunes, iPhoto all worked, no problems.

The original User account (home folder) remained on the boot volume, so I dragged it to the Trash. I verified that I could still log in to the account on the flash drive, confirming the one created on the boot volume was no longer required.

Attempting to log in to the account with the flash drive disconnected resulted in an expected error (below) and obviously you wouldn't want to do that while using the account.

Reconnecting the flash drive restored the ability to log in as expected.

This seems to be no different than previous OS X versions, so perhaps it will give you some encouragement.

Hello John,

I had the dual hd system, with boot in the ssd and home folder in the other drive but in Snow Leopard,

then the home hd died so I got a new drive, reinstalled everything and updated to Mavericks;

I am following your instructions to setup again the home folder in the second drive,

so I made another admin user to drag the home folder but when doing this Os tells me

I do not have the rights for the task so it basically fails copying the whole thing.

(I tried adding the write-read permits for the second user but didn't change the final outcome).

Is there something I am doing wrong?

this is the sequence:

-create second admin user

-login second admin user

-copy first admin user home to other drive -----> fail

mega thanks for your time!

Thank you!!!

For those w/a SSD+HDD, everything I've read suggests it makes more sense to move only "parts" of the Home folder rather then the entire thing*. Only files/folders that are infrequently used or large should go into the HDD, everything else (esp. most of the stuff in the hidden ~Library folder) is best-off left on the SSD. This approach takes advantage of the strengths of your SSD & your HDD.

*those parts can be symlinked back to the SSD