Moving Your Users Directory - OSX Leopard - Part 1
Part 1 - Short and Sweet
Part 2 - Step
by Step with System Configuration Guide
Written by Rick Stephens
All tasks in this guide are to be performed at the readers risk.
It is possible to make your data difficult or impossible to access. Or
if improperly performed you can even
permanently erase your data files.
No guarantee is implied or rendered, especially since we are not doing the
work ourselves. Your results are dependent on your proper understanding
and implementation of the suggestions made in this guide. We advise you do
nothing until
you fully read and understand the
procedures in this guide and have an independent backup of your data. Mistakes
happen, preventing data loss with prudent backups is one of life's keys to
success.
Moving your Users Directory:
You can relocate your Users Directory, which is the folder where
all the individual users' Home Directories are located, to any attached hard
drive
on
your
Mac.
There
are
quite
a
few reasons that this is advantageous, the two primary ones that come to mind
are
improved
performance
and better data security. This page will not go into depth on how to configure
the drives for best purpose, but only how to move and then set the new path
to the new user's Home location.
We'll leave the detailed system performance and configuration guidelines with
step by step procedures to Part
2.
Step One - Copy Users to new Location:
First, in Finder, create a new empty folder called 'Users' on the
hard drive or partition where you wish to relocate. Then use
your
copy
program
of
choice
(CCC, SuperDuper, ChronoSync, SyncPro...
etc) to copy your original Users folder and all its contents into the new
Users
folder. old
Users -> new Users
Step Two - Link to new User Location:
Leopard makes this really easy. Open System Preferences. Go to Account
Preferences. Click the lock to make changes and enter your Admin
Users password. Right click on the user's name that you wish to change the
Home Directory path and open the Advanced Options window.
Your Home Directory line will
show the path:
/Users/name
For 'name' you will see the users short name.
My short user name is ricks,
so on my computer the default path is: /Users/ricks
We are going to edit that path to read:
/Volumes/volume name/Users/name
For 'volume name' enter the name
of the drive or partition where you copied the new Users Directory.
On my computer that hard drive name is 'Local' - so on my
computer the path becomes: /Volumes/Local/Users/ricks
You can also use the 
button
and navigate to your new User Directory. Use the Navigation window to work your
way to
your
new
User
folder
and
select
your Home directory. Clicking Open will fill in the path for you.
Check it to make sure the path shown matches the guidelines listed above.
Repeat the 'resetting the path' process for each User that you are
moving.
Restart to Activate.
After a restart you will now be operating from the new location for
your Home Directory. To make a quick check that it indeed is operating off the
new location, do a Get Info on your Home Directory
in
the Finder Sidebar. It will indicate the path in the 'Where:' field under General.
For more Detailed Guidance, go to Page 2
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