OS X :: Benefit Or Not To Relocate Users Folder To External Hard Drive?
Apr 8, 2009
I just got myself a Mac Mini and a 2 TB Western Digital My Book Studio II External Hard Drive. I just wanted to run this idea by you guys to give me some expert advice. What I did was I made the 2 TB Western Digital into a 1 TB External Hard Drive with RAID 1. Then I went to System Preferences/Accounts and changed the location of the Users folder to the External Hard Drive.
So, essentially, (I think....) the entire OS is running on the Mac Mini, and then whatever data, Movies, Music, Preferences, additional Accounts etc..... I run from my External via Firewire 800. What do you all think about this set up? I have no idea why and how I came up with that, but that was how my Windows computer was set up (Recent Mac convert!)
I just got my second hard drive installed in my optical bay, how I relocate all my "scratch" to the second hard drive while keeping it linked to the applications on the primary SSD. Particularly, I want to move my itunes library and my iphoto library, and anything else I can while maintaining native functionality.
I have performed these steps:Â create test account with user name testcreate test folder on an external HDchanged home folder for the user to the test folder on the ext. HD using Advanced Options under Users & Groups.rebootedÂ
I have observed that any user can see content of test/Documents and ls -l shows that the current user is the owner.Â
So for example if there is an account Frank, Frank can see the content of test/Documents and Frank is shown as an owner.Â
i cannot save my folder to the external hard drive by simply dragging it. how can save a folder to a hard drive. my hard drive is 500 gig free space and folder is about 5 gig file.
I am running version 10.4.11 of OS X and would like to find software that will allow for password protection for a folder(s) on an external hard drive used with my MAC. I want others to be able to access most of the files on this drive however. Setting multiple users with passwords will not accomplish what I am looking to do.
I have recently started using a Time Capsule with an external hard drive attached. I have moved my music and video to the external hard drive to free up space on my MacBook Pro hard drive. I have set up iTunes to play from the external hard drive (which works fine), however, although I have changed the location of the iTune media folder in Preferences it keeps reverting to the iTunes media folder on my Mac's hard drive.
Okay here's the thing: I (not so long ago) copied my entire itunes library to my external hard drive. Now I have updated my itunes library on my powerbook, and want to make sure that I back up the new songs/albums I have. The problem with this is that I have always found that when I drag the itunes folder from my powerbook to the itunes folder on my external drive, it asks to 'replace the itunes music folder'. I don't want this as there are some albums that I have stored in my folder but not on my itunes library and still want to keep them stored.
Is there any way that I could just keep adding to the 'existing' itunes folder on my external drive?
I have my iTunes Library Folder on my external hard drive which is a WD MyBook Live.I did this to save room on my macbook's hard drive. It is great and I successfully moved the folder over and saved tons of space on my hard drive.The problem I'm having is that each time I turn on my computer and open iTunes for the first time it asks me to manually locate the iTunes Library Folder.I have gone in and reset and updated the physical location of the folder to the external hard drive but it still makes me go and manually find it before it will open.Once I do that it works fantastic.
Info: MacBook, Mac OS X (10.6.8), WD MyBook Live External Hard Drive
I accidentally formatted my external hard drive when I was creating a Windows USB install disk with Boot Camp It was a HFS+ formatted drive with a GUID partition table and 2 partitions: one clone of my Macbook OS, and one with personal data. I'm not worried about the OS clone, I'm more concerned about getting my personal data back on the second partition.So far I've used Stellar Phoenix and Data Rescue 3. I reformatted the hard drive from FAT to HFS+ before I did these scans. Not sure if it was a good idea, but the programs wouldn't scan properly otherwise.Stellar finds my files with the original folder structure, but I can't open any of the files, even though the file sizes seem to be correct. Data Rescue partially finds the original folder structure, and also has a "Reconstructed files" section which has all my files sorted by file type and without the original file name. I really want to avoid going through all my photos, videos, etc. one by one to sort them out.
Can I still recover my files in the original folder structure? Why can Stellar find all my files basically intact, but I can't open anything? In the meantime, I'm going to try scanning with Disk Drill and FileSalvage with fingers crossed...
I have a WD external hard drive that I got for the holiday's last year.Here lately I've been using it as my iTunes library. A great way to free up some space on my Powerbook g4. Question is, why does iTunes keep changing my library folder after I'd already changed it when I initially set up the hard drive as my iTunes library destination?
Another question is how do I make sure that all my music files automatically go to the folder on the external hard drive when I download music. For example I may snag a free song from a website and will double click it after downloading and it plays in itunes. I want that file to be saved on my external hard drive as well (yes it's plugged up and plugged in).
I only have an 8g ipod so I have to constantly check and uncheck songs that I want to hear, so I want to be sure they are all in the same locale. And one way I know that certain files are on my internal and not external is when i unplug my external those files still play when they shouldn't unless it's plugged up.
I know I saw the question post a while back about moving the Users folder to another partition or drive. I always wanted to do that as well and then I found out how to do it easily....
this is from MacWorld Magazine: Quote: Open Terminal and type the following commands:
sudo niutil -createprop / "/Users/username" home "/Volumes/volumename/Users/username"
Sudo asks for your password to provide temporary root access, which is necessary for this exercise; volumename is the name of the new volume; and username is the name of your user folder. If that last line returns errors in Terminal or doesn't work, go to your NetInfo Manager in the Utilities folder. Click the lock to allow changes, look in the /users/username folder and highlight your username. Down below in the properties list there is a property that is called home, highlight that one and change the value from /Users/username to /Volumes/volumename/Users/username Quote:.................
I am trying to copy my iTunes folder from one external hard drive to another external hard drive but I keep getting an error message "unable to copy because file (song name) is in use". It starts copying for a while but keeps stopping when the error message pops up. No songs are playing so I am not sure why it says certain song files are in use.
Why did the Mavericks install create two shared user folders on my hard drive ('brw0080929854c2' and 'netgear106ebe') ? What should I do with these, delete or are they essential ?
with cloning/copying the content one an external hard drive onto a new external hard drive. Basically, I have a 500GB FW400 drive which I use to store my media files. It's full, so I purchased a 1TB FW800 drive to replace it. Obviously, I thought I could simply copy and paste the media files from the old drive to the new one.I cannot copy the media files to my internal drive first as my internal drive is only 250GB and nearly full itself.I have used Disk Utility to attempt to close the old drive to the new drive, but keep getting "insufficient space" errors.
Recently I bought 2 identical WD Scorpio Blue 1TB hard drives for my macbook pro 13 inch 2010. My aim is to replace the internal hard drive with one of the two I just purchased and use it as my system drive with Lion, Windows and Data partitions. And for the other hard drive I want to use it as a full disk back up for the internal drive (now 1TB hard drive). After I was done with setting up both windows and mac and data transfer, when I booedt into the recovery partition from the internal drive to clone the drive to the external drive, the disk utility gave me this error (Could not validate source - error 254). I also tried using Carbon Copy Cloner but it only could clone partitions, not the entire drive. Yesterday I downloaded a copy of Clonezilla. It worked fine until it had to clone an exFAT partition (my data partition). The exFAT partition appeared as 'RAW' partition in clonezilla. As a result, the whole partition appeared to be full and clonezilla had to copy every single blocks of data in that partition and the estimated time remaining was about 30 hours. So clonezilla is out too. Just want to ask if there is any program/application (bootable or not) which allows can do a full disk clone to an external hard drive.
My home folder appears to have gone missing from the Users folder in finder. See screenshot - I can see the test account I created and the shared folder but not my home folder. Â
I can still access my home folder via the sidebar but this causes problems with some software not being able to see my home folder in their browsers (Nikon Capture NX2 being an example).Â
I've had a lot of problems with my iMac G5 power supply and since I have newer computers I've decided to get rid of this computer.Â
I want to save the hard drive and put it in a case, then use it as an external drive on my other Macs.Â
What sort of case do I need to shop for? Should I look for SATA or what exactly is the proper nomenclature.Â
Is USB 2 the preferred choice, or Firewire, or what? Is there a USB 3? I use a mid-2010 27 inch iMac with the intel processor, and I needed to buy an adapter to use my older Firewire external drive. Is Firewire a dodo?Â
i have a power mac g-5 quad with an external dvd drive and a external hard drive and 2gb of ram. on my ext. hard drive i downloaded mac the ripper and that is where i put all my dvds, now today on my pmac i was using mac the ripper, popcorn, itunes, safari all at once and it froze up on me?why? could the ram be an issue? how may programs can i use at once with my pmac?
Looking for opinions or comparisons on performance between an internal mac hard drive vs an external firewire 800 hard drive or better. Is the performance on an internal MP drive or iMac internal drive much faster than connecting to a firewire 800 drive? I'm sure it depends on the drive, I'm wondering about apple factory installed internal drive vs say a WD external firewire 800
I have 160.5MB on my HD, an I have done everything I know how to do to free it up but still nothing!I'm wondering, can I move the home folders to my external hardrives?