How to migrate a "user" whose account is stored on an external drive by just moving the drive?

[brandsteve]

How to migrate a "user" whose account is stored on an external drive by just moving the drive?

Since MacMini storage is crazy expensive, we want to leave my wife's account on her external drive. I'm sure there is a straightforward way to move her account only and then set it up to use the external.

What are the options?

 

[hobowankenobi]

Here is a write-up that covers it pretty well. The interface has changed on the latest OSes, but the process should be the same.

I say should be...as I have not done this myself on OS 13.

 

[brandsteve]

I found that Migration doesn't move data on the external drive. Migrating just the user took just a couple of minutes.

After the migration, I connected the external drive, went to system settings -> user, did option (or similar click) to pull up advanced settings for the user and selected the external drive as the location of their user's home directory.

Was actually pretty easy.

Surprised Apple doesn't clearly document this.

Starting over with Time Machine, but for some reason it's not backing up the external drive. It's not on the exclusion list! Will try rebooting to see if that clears whatever is going on there.