Move home dir to a removable drive?

jbljbl
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
I want to move my home directory to a removable drive so that I can share it between several machines that I use (and don't have to worry about syncing files and stuff... syncing takes forever when you have 5 Gb of stuff). Is there a way to do this? I figured I could copy my home directory to the removable drive and (while logged in as another admin) remove my home directory and replace it with an alias pointing to the copy on my removable drive. Will this work?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 6
    thuh freakthuh freak Posts: 2,664member
    doubtful. you could try making a softlink to it. try moving it to another drive, then doing this (in terminal):

    [code] ln -s /Volumes/theDriveYouMovedItTo/WhereYouPutIt /Users/;</pre><hr></blockquote>



    if you do `ls /Volumes/` you can see the drives you have mounted. this softlink method requires that the drive be mounted before you login of course. i dont know what would happen if that drive wasn't there.



    'ln -s' is how u make an alias in *nix. but that may not work. i think its more likely to work than a finder-style alias.
  • Reply 2 of 6
    xaqtlyxaqtly Posts: 450member
    [quote]Originally posted by JBL:

    <strong>I want to move my home directory to a removable drive so that I can share it between several machines that I use</strong><hr></blockquote>



    The best way to do this would be to buy Mac OS X Server, install it on on of your Macs and set up Network Users on it. This will allow you to log in from any one of your OS X Macs as yourself and it will load your home directory and everything in it from the server rather than locally.



    Works like a charm. I guess the downside is that you have to buy OS X Server and install it on one of your Macs. But it does what you need very well.
  • Reply 3 of 6
    jbljbl Posts: 555member
    The other problem is that one of the Macs is behind a Firewall and the IT people really do not want anyone trying to do offsite filesharing, and the other two are networked via phone lines and PPP (one of them is in a location where broadband isn't even offered.



    I should get a chance to play around with this some over the next couple days. I'll report back if I have any success.
  • Reply 4 of 6
    the inevitablethe inevitable Posts: 62member
    This might work but I have never tried it before:



    To change your Home directory, launch the NetInfo Manager thats located in your Utilities folder, select "/" in the top pane, then select "Users," select the user you want to modify the Home directory for, scroll-down in the bottom pane until you see "home" listed in the left column, then finally click on the directory path to change it (you may have to authenticate yourself first in order to make changes). You'll have to do this for every computer that you want using the removable drive as the Home directory. Also, it would be good to have the Home directory path pointing to a folder instead of the drive itself. Save your changes and that should be it.





    Here's an example on what to change it to:



    Lets say your removable drive is named "Removable1," and you have created a folder on it called "Home" that you will point to to use as your home directory. Change the Home directory path to "/Removable1/Home" Basically, the part after the first "/" will be the name of the drive, and the part after the second "/" will be the path to the folder you want to use as your Home directory.





    I hope this helps you =)
  • Reply 5 of 6
    scottscott Posts: 7,431member
    I see no reason why you can't do this and I think The Inevitable has the best solution. Back up all your stuff, copy it to the removable make sure you are the "owner" of the folder, then change your user profile to point to the removable.



    For safety you may want to create a new user and copy all your stuff to that. Then after it has worked out for a while stop using the old one.





    Back up often
  • Reply 6 of 6
    jbljbl Posts: 555member
    Hmmm. Didn't work.



    I did what The Inevitable suggested and used NetInfo to set the home directory of one user to a copy of my home directory on the removable drive. Logged out and logged in as the new user. First attempt didn't work because I didn't have permissions but after correcting that everything seemed to work. Played around with a bunch of apps and the only one that didn't work was Chimera. Anyway, I logged back out. Logged in on my regular account and removed the removable drive.



    Come back a two weeks later. I am not sure if anything relevant happened in that time. I removed and attached the drive a bunch of times but I didn't log in to that account. Yesterday, I attached the removable drive and logged out of my regular account. The log in window would not start up properly. It would appear for a second or two and then disappear for a minute over and over. Didn't seem responsive to my clicking. I did a hard restart. The computer started up normally. However, when I logged into the account on the external drive none of my files where there <img src="graemlins/surprised.gif" border="0" alt="[surprised]" />



    Turns out that there was a folder in /Volumes with the same name as my removable drive. It seems that when the drive was removed, OS X simply recreated the path to this phantom user's home directory. I never tried to log in as this user when the drive was not attached so the only thing I can think of is that the path to this directory must be there even when the user is not logged in. If the OS is actually doing something with the home directory of users who are not logged in, it seems unlikely that any method will work. Any idea what it could be doing?
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