Moving User Home Folder to External Drive

I'm using 10.3.6 and over a year ago (maybe 2) I found a trick (in a magazine and on the web in a few places) to move my user folder to an external firewire drive. I haven't been able to find it since. In a fit of New Year's cleaning I accidentally disconnected the firewire drive while the system was running. Upon restart the system had created a new user folder for me back on the startup drive. All my files are still in the user folder on the FWHD.
I looked in the NetInfo Manager and it shows my home property as being on the external drive with the correct path. I also deleted the property and re-added it thinking that might make it take a look again. Nope.
I've deleted/renamed the newly created file. But it just creates a new one.
I've learned the barest amount about symbolic links and done
ln -s /Volumes/Titian/Users/rothrock /Users
in the terminal. I've combined that with renaming/deleting the existing one, as well as either just a logout and login or restart.
I'm at my wits end and would really like to be able to have all my files and settings back the way I used to.
First question does anybody know how to do the equivelent of "blessing" a user folder?
If not, how can I set up a new user that has its home folder on the external HD and then just copy all the files back over? (My start up drive is way too small and I need the space.)
Sorry for the cross-post, but I'm thinking the Unix folks might not visit the other sections too often.

Of course as soon as I say I can't find the original trick I think I found it. But maybe not.
http://www.bombich.com/mactips/homedir.html
I tried this, but the first command sudo ditto etc. should copy the existing user directory (on my startup drive) to the external drive, right? But it doesn't do that. So I'm a bit confused.

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Moved User Home Folder to External - What to do with iTunes settings?

I used these instructions to move my User Home Folder off Mac hard drive and onto an external hard drive http://mac.tutsplus.com/tutorials/os-x/relocate-your-home-folder-to-another-driv e-or-volume. Do I need to go into advanced settings of iTunes and change the location to the external or do I just keep the location the same as before the move via these instructions?

turingtest2 wrote:
OK. The following should clear up your particular scenario. I strongly recommend you backup the whole iTunes folder to another drive first. When you're happy everything is tidy and working properly you can make a backup of the "clean" library before deleting the backup of the "duplicated" one.
In iTunes > Preferences > Advanced turn off both the Keep... & Copy... options.
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Create a new smart playlist with the rule Location is on this computer.
3a. Select the new smart playlist
Hold down Option and then click View > Display Exact Duplicate items.
Sort the list by Date Added
Select everything that you've just added with today's date, then press Option-Delete to remove from the library, send to the trash when asked
Use View > Show All Items and then Option > View > Show Exact Duplicate Items to reveal any remaining duplicates.
If needed, sort by Name and keep one of each repeat group, using Option-Delete to remove any dupes
In iTunes > Preferences > Advanced turn on both the Keep... & Copy... options to clean up all the trailing " 1"s
tt2

Home folder on external drive

I use my Mac mini as a server in the net- my homefolder with all my data is located on an attached external drive. My work I actually do on a Macbook (other user account!) that is on this network. Nearly all the programs running on the Macbook refer to the liberies on the external drive attached to the mac mini.
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My Question: Would it be wiser to refer the path of the homefolder of user of the macbook to the homefolder of the user of the Macmini (on the external datadrive) I
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For exampel when I insert a CD into the Macbook its data will be imported to my musicfolder on the external drive in the net....Hope it is not to difficult...Lots of thanks...Yours Frank
You dont need to reconfigure your homefolder to do this. You just setup itunes to have default music folder anywhere you choose. itunes-->preferences-->advanced-->itunes music folder location
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HT1364 If I already moved Itunes media folder to external drive and now music is not matching up in iTunes?

Dear Itunes Community~
This is my first time using glad you are here, but all the passwords!!
Question/Quandry:
If I already moved Itunes media folder to my external drive and now my music is not matching up in iTunes, what should I do? I have tried my solution !?, and now I have 17,000 songs, instead of 9,000!
Should I just uninstall Itunes, and then reinstall Itunes, and let it do it's thing, and then figure out how to move to the external hard drive later?
Help, I screwed it up all on my own!
Any/all help and Itunes educated suggestions appreciated!
Thank you very much,
Doris =:o
PS ~~ Is there anyway to easily delete duplicates?? Seems not?

I have a very similar problem. Hope I don't confuse people trying to help us since the solutions may be different.
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I decided to try downloading a new app and, sure enough, iTunes once again downloaded it into the very same Mobile Applications folder on my main hard drive, where all my (now orphaned) original apps are, but the only one iTunes will only display in my Apps window is the new one. I read you can redownload purchased apps, but my apps are not missing. iTunes just won't display them in the Apps window anymore.

When trying to transfer a folder from external drive to "users" folder, it says it cannot be modified because it is required by OS X. What does this mean?

When trying to transfer a folder from external drive to "users" folder, it says it cannot be modified because it is required by OS X. What does this mean? How can I transfer the folder?

It sounds like you're trying to replace a home folder. Replace the contents of the folder instead, or use Migration Assistant.
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When logging on to Windows 7 user gets a second mapped drive to the users home folder

Morning,
I'm working through an issue we've discovered whilst trialing Windows 7. Our environment is setup as follows.
Domain Controllers are Windows Server 2003
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Windows XP and Windows 7 Clients are in seperate OU's
All Windows XP Group Policies apply to Windows XP And Windows 7 clients, Windows 7 policies are then applied to Windows 7 clients after
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We had the exact same issue happen to us. No issue on Windows XP but Windows 7 mapped two home drives (F and Z). F was mapped during the login script and Z was being mapped by some unknown reason.
We use Netapp for our storage and home drives and use a feature called CIFS Home Drive Mapping. This essentially maps a user to a folder not available through normal CIFS methods causing AD to error when setting the home drive. To get around this we use
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dsquery user -name %UserNameX% | dsmod user -hmdrv F -hmdir \\filer\$username$
Notice there is no ":" after the F
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homeDrive attributefor the user account was set to "F" instead of "F:"
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User Accounts on an external drive - is this possible

I am planning to purchase a Mac Mini (with a 60 gig drive) for our household. There will be multiple user accounts set up, and I would like to have the user accounts on an external 500 gig LaCie drive (to allow for separate, potentially large iTunes and iPhoto libraries).
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Log in from each account and then copy that account's home folder to the external drive. Once all of the home folders have been copied, open the NetInfo Manager in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder and change the home property for each of the accounts you created on the system to point to the external drive; this will look like /Volumes/volumename/Users/username/. After all of the home folders have been moved, create a new administrator account in the Accounts pane of System Preferences for troubleshooting purposes, and then verify that everything works properly from each of the other accounts. Don't delete or alter any accounts which you didn't create or don't recognize.
(18462)

How do I relocate part of my home folder onto another drive

Hi all
I am about to take delivery of my new Mac Pro, but with only 512MB of startup SSD I don't have room for my whole home folder. I have found plenty of info online about moving my whole home folder onto another drive, but as my external drive is only USB3 I don't want to do that. Instead I want to move my Movies and Pictures folders only and then tell my system to forget about the old location and treat the new location as though it is the home folder just for those two bits.
Sure I can just copy them over and delete the old folder contents, but as soon as I want to do something like save a pic or movie the system defaults to the old empty location.
It's not the end of the world, but if I can fix it, I'd like to. The plan is to sort this on my current Mac Mini before the new toy arrives, so I can easily set up the new one.
All guidance gratefully received.
Regards
Tim

Hello,
You can use some basic unix wizardry to make this happen. What you will be doing is creating a unix "soft link" from your home directory to the actual location of the directories, wherever they may be. This link serves as a "behind-the-scenes redirect" to the actual location to which you link. For example, with the soft link in place, if you
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Open the Terminal app.
From the command prompt, type the following commands (with a <return> after each) to create a soft link (in this example we are using the "Movies" folder. The "Movies" folder must have been moved in Step 1 to the external HDD):
cd
ln -s /Volumes/Storage/Movies Movies
Repeat the "ln -s" command for each folder that you have moved in Step 1.
Here's what's happening in Step 3:
The "cd" command just ensures that you are in your home directory.
The "ln -s" command creates a link from the external HDD directory, to a directory in your present location (i.e., your home directory)
There is one side affect that I don't know how to get around. Once you do this, the icon that shows up for the "Movies" folder in your home directory will no longer be the fancy system icon for the Movies folder. It will be a vanilla folder icon, with an curved arrow. The curved arrow is a visual indication that the file/folder is link to somewhere else.
Hope this helps.

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~/Library is probably the one you don't want to move back because it may bring the issues back along with it.
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To access your hidden ~/Library folder go to your Finder "Go" menu hold the option key to choose "Library".
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Mobile User doesnt work with user directory set on external drive

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Server HD/Users/glimonez - Works like a charm
Same Xserve second drive
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Sorry for long post
Gabe

Can't create an alias for User home folder for a second user

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hi Petar,
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hi niel.
i just want to make sure i understand this. in part i want to minimize what i have on the 2006 and get it on the 2012 i think.
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In addition you have to make the sharepoint able to be automaticly mounted. The manual say this is very important.
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Hi, i think it depends who are you serving for, if you are just serving for a small office or home server or a big organization. The following quick thinking just came to me:
I think cups set automatically a system user of its own, and runs as it, so no trouble there. Cups also has the option to set users and it uses the system users as default, i think it depends in in how many printers/users your have in your server.Users that can manage cups are in the lp group.
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You should run the web server (owncloud ) as it own user, maybe you can manage to set something up for owncloud in the filesystem, but owncloud uses a database, and the users for owncloud are stored in there, and they are not system users.
You can configure ssh for local use only enabling the corresponding subnets in your /etc/sshd.conf and optionally but recommended you can set a firewall and permissions. You can use iptables but i prefer ufw for simple setup.
I think you should read the wiki:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/users_and_groups
and the other respective topics in the wiki.
Also as an advice i know that arch linux is a great distribution, but you have to do more work to mantain a stable server. I would recommend debian or another more conservative distro, but of course it is your choice.
Last edited by hydrosIII (2014-11-06 06:26:45)

Moving User Home Folder to External Drive

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