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13.3 Breaks Home Folder on External Drive
- Thread starter sebfrey
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- ventura 13.3
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Yes I completely agree. I lived with a 256GB iMac for years by putting all libraries and media on externals. This works but I felt it was clunky compared to just having the complete Home Directory on an external. I considered doing it many times while I had the iMac, but never did because of the warnings, not just as above but in all discussions I found.
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Since my AppleCare was still good for my Mac Pro, I called Apple and raised a case.
I told the support engineer how my system was configured (with my home defined on /Volumes/Users) and how the 13.3 update broke my world.
The support engineer did not say "Oh, that's not supported" or words to that effect.
He was unaware of the problem, but he did not try to blame the my system configuration.
~f
Placing user home directories off the root filesystem is an ancient and preferable Unix practice, especially when there are multiple users. Doing this is also directly supported by Apple (link below).
Managing a bunch of symlinks to implement this capability based on unknown subdirectory sizes is not a good, robust alternative.
Apple must just fix whatever they broke in 13.3.
Everyone please file bug reports via Feedback Assistant.
Change the name of your macOS user account and home folder - Apple Support
You can rename your macOS user account and home folder, which were named when the account was created.
Quote from that support article:
Again, we seem to have very different definitions of what supported means. But I give up now, I am sure Apple will fix this "supported" feature any day now. I have had tiny 250GB Macbooks for years and had no issue storing my data elsewhere and never had to move the entire user directory. Nobody forces you to store the data on the internal drive. The only app I found that did not support being moved from ~/Library at all was some cloud sync, I think it was either O365 or iCloud, and I fixed that with a symlink.
Of course not, they had no idea what you're talking about. Customer facing Apple support can handle a ticketing system and reads off a script, they're not unix sysadmins. Apple support is also known to pretend known issues don't exist.
That link talks about renaming the home directory, whilst keeping it in /Users. It is not about moving it to another location.Placing user home directories off the root filesystem is an ancient and preferable Unix practice, especially when there are multiple users. Doing this is also directly supported by Apple (link below).
Change the name of your macOS user account and home folder - Apple Support
You can rename your macOS user account and home folder, which were named when the account was created.support.apple.com
I just ran into a snag after re-enabling SIP.
I have a gmail email account (IMAP) that was working perfectly well after step 7. When I re-enabled SIP, it was offline. Nothing would bring it back and there were no error messages or prompts to set the password or anything. After disabling SIP again, the mail account was online immediately.
So, it looks like I need to have SIP disabled permanently until Apple comes up with a fix.
~f
Interesting discussion.
I have the same problem, with the same configuration: home folder on external drive. Now, this has been discouraged (but not forbidden) by Apple from quite some time. I once called apple support because my account was taking more than 5 minutes to load. The guy spent 2 hours with me, puzzled as he was, until he realised that my home folder was not where it was supposed to be. Within 10s he was out of the call. That was a me problem.
So I lived with it, and also with having to restore the link to the home folder every time I restarted the computer.
With 13.3, everything broke, so I endeavoured to fix things: put home folder on my puny internal drive and move all data (pictures, movies, etc.) out.
Not easy. I'm no slouch when it comes with playing around the system, but I've lost 2 days just reinstalling everything, and it is still not ok: Finder crashes.
Some things don't work the same: I tried to copy the desktop preference from the old system to the new: wrong, it is not "desktop" picture anymore, but "wallpaper".
So all this to (1) add myself to those with the problem, and (2) concur that Apple had warned us against that for quite a while (yes it used to be possible but less advisable as of 13.11 or 13.12, and apparently not workable on 13.13, except with some tricky Terminal manipulations)
But here is my question:
when putting data folders out of the home folder and on an external drive, is there a way that the original "Music", "Pictures" or "Movies" folders be redirected to this new location? Because they're folders you can't delete and adding alias to the new ones clutters the home folder.
cheers
I have the same problem, with the same configuration: home folder on external drive. Now, this has been discouraged (but not forbidden) by Apple from quite some time. I once called apple support because my account was taking more than 5 minutes to load. The guy spent 2 hours with me, puzzled as he was, until he realised that my home folder was not where it was supposed to be. Within 10s he was out of the call. That was a me problem.
So I lived with it, and also with having to restore the link to the home folder every time I restarted the computer.
With 13.3, everything broke, so I endeavoured to fix things: put home folder on my puny internal drive and move all data (pictures, movies, etc.) out.
Not easy. I'm no slouch when it comes with playing around the system, but I've lost 2 days just reinstalling everything, and it is still not ok: Finder crashes.
Some things don't work the same: I tried to copy the desktop preference from the old system to the new: wrong, it is not "desktop" picture anymore, but "wallpaper".
So all this to (1) add myself to those with the problem, and (2) concur that Apple had warned us against that for quite a while (yes it used to be possible but less advisable as of 13.11 or 13.12, and apparently not workable on 13.13, except with some tricky Terminal manipulations)
But here is my question:
when putting data folders out of the home folder and on an external drive, is there a way that the original "Music", "Pictures" or "Movies" folders be redirected to this new location? Because they're folders you can't delete and adding alias to the new ones clutters the home folder.
cheers
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You can delete them and create new ones that are aliases of folders on another drive. There are permissions that you have to overcome (an ACL which denies delete to everyone), but otherwise it works fine. I have deleted my Music and Movies and replaced them with aliases to their locations on another disk. I have kept my Pictures in my home folder, but I am sure I could move it too.
I suggest you don't do the same thing with Documents, Desktop and Downloads because I have had issues when not located in the home folder. I keep Downloads fairly clear by a Hazel rule which moves stuff to another disk when a week old.
There’s definitely merit to the points raised in this thread about what “supported” means about moving home directories out of /Users. I’ve also observed several third-party applications break on accounts whose home directories have ~/Library on external drives with spaces in the path name.
I’ve decided to throw in the towel and use symlinks to accomplish this. Upon assessing disk usage with a tool like baobab, I’ve implemented the approach below and verify that it works. This uses the MacPorts rsync binary to preserve ACL’s and extended attributes; note that the native macOS /usr/bin/rsync doesn’t have all of these flags.
[Edited to exclude more large directories.]
I’ve decided to throw in the towel and use symlinks to accomplish this. Upon assessing disk usage with a tool like baobab, I’ve implemented the approach below and verify that it works. This uses the MacPorts rsync binary to preserve ACL’s and extended attributes; note that the native macOS /usr/bin/rsync doesn’t have all of these flags.
Bash:
sudo rsync -ah -A -X -U -N -H --info=progress2 "/Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/${USER}" "/Users" --exclude "Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup" --exclude Library/iTunes --exclude Library/Logs --exclude Library/Messages/Attachments --exclude Library/Photos --exclude Audio --exclude Backups --exclude Documents --exclude Movies --exclude Music --exclude Pictures
for d in "Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup" Library/iTunes Library/Logs Library/Messages/Attachments Library/Photos Audio Backups Documents Movies Music Pictures; do ln -s "/Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/${USER}/${d}" "/Users/${USER}/${d}"; done[Edited to exclude more large directories.]
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That warning is there because changes can cause significant problems with the user account, particularly permissions. For instance, the User ID should not be changed without knowing what the implications of that change are. Such changes are not easily undone, hence the warning.
The permissions on home folder and top level folders within home folder should be like this:
Code:
ls -lahe@O /Users
...
drwxr-xr-x@ 90 gilby staff - 2.8K 6 Apr 10:03 gilby
0: group:everyone deny delete
ls -laheO ~
...
drwx------@ 25 gilby staff - 800B 2 Apr 16:26 Desktop
0: group:everyone deny delete
...With the same for all of Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Library, Movies, Music, Pictures
To change [TEST THIS ON SOMETHING UNIMPORTANT]:
If ownership is not right, you need
sudo chown <user>:staff <folder>If POSIX permissions are wrong
sudo chmod +700 <folder>If ACL is wrong:
Remove ACL:
sudo chmod -N <folder> Add ACE:
sudo chmod +a "group:everyone deny delete" <folder>NOTE: ACL is an Access Control List which comprises of one or more ACEs (Access Control Entry).
----
The whole area of resetting a user account is very murky with Apple at various times saying how to do this (in Support articles) and then later removing those articles. Often discussing the use of
diskutil resetUserPermissions and repairHomePermissions. These commands do more than just change top level permissions - e.g. change things within ~/Library.Have read of https://eclecticlight.co/2020/02/18/repairing-permissions-in-your-home-folder-has-changed/ and https://eclecticlight.co/2022/11/18/repairing-home-folder-permissions-a-mystery/ from Howard Oakley to get a feel for the confusion, warnings and possible ways forward.
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Do you maintain multiple backups? If so, rsync from a backup. There is no substitute for 3-2-1 backups. I was reminded in this episode that even a RAID is no substitute for maintaining backups.
I do maintain multiple backups using SuperDuper! (weekly) and Time Machine (daily). When doing potentially dangerous things, I also take a backup of my user folders to keep "air-gapped" from my activities.
Somewhere along the line, I "lost" my home folder's ACLs and extended attributes, though, probably when rsync'ing with the version of rsync that comes with the macOS.
~f
Thank you for this! I'll give it a go as soon as Time Machine finishes it's initial, post-upgrade run (54.5% done, 36 hours and counting)
~f
It has been reported that 13.3.1 fixes this issue:
Update: Mac Home directory bug fixed with macOS Ventura 13.3.1
The System Integrity Protection affects setups that store Home directories on external drives.
www.macworld.com
We’ll see, eh?
~f
Yeah, this was a pretty serious issue causing data loss ... I could see them pushing this update out just to fix this one issue.
It has been reported that 13.3.1 fixes this issue:
Update: Mac Home directory bug fixed with macOS Ventura 13.3.1
The System Integrity Protection affects setups that store Home directories on external drives.
I’m glad Apple fixed this so quickly. Thanks everyone for filing bug reports.
After having implemented both approaches to home directories on an external SSD—maintain the entire home directory externally versus creating symlinks to large directories as done here—moving the entire home directory externally is far preferable to the workflow and fragility that comes with figuring out which symlinks to create and tracking down any permissions or other issues that arise.
That said, I plan to keep the symlink approach for one account to avoid third-party app issues caused by having a home directory ’/Volumes/External Macintosh HD/Users/…’ with spaces in the path.