Friday, November 06, 2009

Move Your Home Folder Off Your SSD Boot Drive in OS X

SSD (Solid State Drives) are the future, kids. They are insanely fast, have no mechanical parts to wear out and run cooler than their platter based counterparts. The main problem with SSDs right now is that in order to get a decently sized drive, you have to sell off one or two of your kids just to pay for it.

As of this second, the cheapest 256GB SSD at NewEgg is hovering at around $600. Ouch. Something in the “reasonable” price arena of less than $200 will only fetch you a 64GB drive. Plenty of room for the OS and a load of useful applications, but not a lot of wiggle room for your stuff. Where will you put your giant collection of bagpipe music in iTunes, your scads of text files with truly bad poetry and an iPhoto Library chock full of compromising photos of co-workers? In all likelihood, you won’t be storing much of your data on the thing. You’re going to have to litter your junk around on another drives/volumes. (i.e., your iTunes media, iPhoto, Lightroom, etc.) That’s all well and good and perfectly reasonable, but you have to do a bunch of fiddling within the individual applications to make all that work. (Don’t get started on how persnickety iTunes can be about having its files live on a separate drive.) And you’ll probably customize your Finder sidebar so you’ll have easy access to where you park your files. Well behaved Mac apps expect to plant their “stuff” in the user’s home directory. (Try this: Hit “Open” in any application. The hit Cmd + Shift + D. Where are you? Your Desktop! Where’s your Desktop? Inside your Home folder, silly!)

So while you can work around the speedy, but decidedly cramped quarters of your SSD, what we really want to do is tell the OS that your home folder “lives” on a different drive. After all, 1TB hard drives are way cheap these days, relatively speaking. Plus, you have a MacPro with a zillion SATA bays in it, right? The following instructions tell you how to move your home folder from your spiffy SSD over to less constrained quarters. You’ll still boot off the SSD and run your apps from it, so your computing life will move faster than you ever thought possible, but all those pesky personal bits will be somewhere else.

Step 0): Back up your mojo. Don’t be an idiot, K? This is pretty painless stuff, but make sure you have a working back up of all your files before you dive into this. Pretty please.

Step 1) Create a new account in “System Preferences --> Accounts”

The home folder for this new account will land on the boot volume, which is the expected behavior. Boo. Let’s fix that!

Step 2) Go make a folder on some other volume. Make sure the name of the folder matches the “Account name.” (the lower case username)

Step 3) Fire up the Terminal and issue the following command: 

sudo ditto -rsrc /Users/test_account /Volumes/07-Sette-TB/Users_n/test_account/

(This command is basically an über “copy” command. Obviously, your folder structure and account name will be different. The -rsrc” switch tells the “ditto” command to snag resource forks and all that HFS meta-data goodness along with all your precious data. The man page for ditto tells me that this switch is the default behavior since 10.4 so it’s probably not necessary; but I do it anyway, because I’m old skool and I have numerous trust issues which I won’t delve into here.)

Step 4) Now comes the cool part. I’m all aflutter just thinking about it. In the Account Pref Pane, Control + click on the account name. Ooooh baby, you had no idea that was there, huh? Smack that “Advanced Options…” pop up like it was a puppy who peed on a rug that really tied the room together.

You should now choose that folder you created in Step 2 as the location for that account’s Home directory:

Step 5) Reboot. (Since you are the proud owner of an SSD powered machine, this is the quickest step in this whole process. Heh.)

After you’ve rebooted, you can logout of your “normal” account (At the bottom of the Apple menu) and log back in as that new user and shazam on a seesaw, that user’s home folder is somewhere else!

I’ve tested this on Snow Leopard (10.6.1) and it works fine. I suspect these instructions probably work fine for Leopard, too; but I don’t have a Leopard machine handy here at the Deal Family Compound to test. (Update: Jamie emailed me and said me he’d tried it out on 10.5 and it works. He also noted that you should be able to upgrade to 10.6 without any problems (which makes sense to me). Thanks, Jamie!) You’re on your own for 10.4 and earlier. Sorry, and have fun mucking around with NetInfo, you poor dear.

If you’re feeling brave, you could skip creating a brand new account (Step 1) and blast straight to ditto-ing your current account to a new location, changing the Home folder setting in the Accounts Pref Pane and rebooting. Should work perfectly well. Me? I’m a safety nut and like to make sure things work, but I can tell that not only are you a fetchingly attractive specimen of a human being, but you also like to live on the edge. Godspeed, my young Padawan. And! Don’t forget to tell Time Machine to back up both your SSD volume and the drive where you’re parking your files.

You could also go nuts and put your home directory on a removable volume (i.e., a USB or FireWire drive), but I wouldn’t recommend it. Depending on when in the boot process your Mac mounts the removable drive, odd or potentially freaky things could happen. Having said that, I’ve put a Portable Home Directory account on a lowly thumb drive in an Open Directory/Portable Home Directory friendly environment and it’s worked fine. No fuss, no muss. But I can also pull sparkle ponies out of my booty on demand. THAT’S HOW SPECIAL I AM. As with all things, your mileage may vary.

Anyway, just thought I’d share. If anyone needs me, I’ll be back in my hole trying to finish this unholy creation I’ve taken to calling “The Decidedly Mediocre, Taking Forever to Write and Tragically Not So Great American Novel.”

Newegg is currently having a sale on 64GB Kingston drives. That’s what I just picked up. $143.99! Plus a $30 mail in rebate I’ll likely forget to do, because though I have that sparkle pony thing going for me, I’m not actually all that bright.

Good luck and please, for the love of all that is holy in the world, never skip Step 0.

Comments are closed because I borked my blog’s commenting system a couple months ago and haven’t bothered to fix it. (Plus, there’s that whole “not actually bright” thing and I may not posses the necessary skills to fix it.) Feel free to email me if you have something to say. Or be a pal and offer to fix my blog’s code. :-]

Jon scribbled this mess on 11/06/09 at 03:49 AM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

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