Move users home directory to a bigger drive

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

On Jul 9, 2007, at 08:09 , Dale Kosan wrote:

> I want to move the whole /Users directory to a bigger drive. I have  
> googled and tried a few of the ways listed but no dice as of yet. I  
> am running 10.4.10. Can some nice people point me to a tried and  
> true way to achieve this? Thanks in advance.
>

There are indeed several ways.
Probably the safest way is to install the user account on a devoted  
alternate disk and create a mountpoint in /User. It's tricky and  
painful, but safe.
The method I use works fine 99.999% of the time and is much easier  
though. Launch the NetInfo Manager and navigate all the way to your  
account in the listings. You can then edit it and specify the new  
location of your user account. Log-out and back in and you are done!
A very few apps use absolute paths (/Users/you) instead of relative  
paths (~/) so I back this up with a symlink in /Users (make sure there  
is no folder left with the name of your account and:
cd /Users
then
sudo ln -s <path to your new user account folder>

The only problem with this method is that it relies on the name of the  
drive (eg: /Volumes/My\ drive) and not its physical address (eg: /dev/ 
disk1s3). There is a slight (extremely rare) risk that you might mount  
another volume with the same name before the one that has your user  
account (in which case the address becomes My drive1). It's no major  
deal though: I've had the problem once in years of using this approach  
(and I was doing some nasty stuff) and it was pretty easy to correct.


Corentin