Moving user data back to boot drive

[ashleykaryl]

For the last year or so I've been using a 256gig SSD on a PCI card as the boot drive, but kept my 600+ gigs of user files on a much larger internal SATA drive. This has worked well enough, however it's starting to cause difficulties with some apps, since OS X now blocks certain processes viewed as cross origin, even though it's on the same computer and clearly linked.

The solution it seems is to move my essential user data onto the SSD and have the system recognise that as the source of the user data. A lot of the files I have under my user could be stored on other drives, such as accounts and work info etc. I also understand iMovie for example can happily access data from other drives, so all I really want is the essential user data needed to run the system on that SSD.

Is this simply a case of dragging my user's Library folder from the SATA over to the SSD and then choosing that as the user inside system preferences, followed by a restart? This would appear to be roughly 50 gigs on top of the existing 90 gigs used by the SSD, but that still leaves me with 100 gigs of space.

 

[ashleykaryl]

Just a quick follow up to say that I resolved this by using the "paste exactly" option through the Finder. The OS wouldn't let me copy/paste the actual Library folder, so the trick is not to select the user Library folder, but the inner contents. On a side note, you'll probably have to make the user Library visible via the terminal.

After copying across all the Library contents you'll have to change the user startup under advanced options in the system preference user settings before restarting. Always make a backup first.

To make this work, I've had to leave a lot of the big things like the iMovie database and music library on the old SATA, due to SSD space limitations, but these can easily be accessed via symlinks. Overall this is a much better solution than I had previously and it's resolved the issues I was seeing with items being blocked as cross origin.

The only perplexing point is that if I click on the SSD user Library folder and hit cmd+i for information it tells me the folder is just 22mb, yet clicking on individual folders inside are much bigger. Mail alone is over 8 gigs. On the original SATA that user Library is around 50 gigs and I can see the available space on the SSD is now around 50 gigs less, so this seems to be some sort bug in the OS that is not reporting the correct folder/file size.

 

[Taz Mangus]

Just a quick follow up to say that I resolved this by using the "paste exactly" option through the Finder. The OS wouldn't let me copy/paste the actual Library folder, so the trick is not to select the user Library folder, but the inner contents. On a side note, you'll probably have to make the user Library visible via the terminal.

After copying across all the Library contents you'll have to change the user startup under advanced options in the system preference user settings before restarting. Always make a backup first.

To make this work, I've had to leave a lot of the big things like the iMovie database and music library on the old SATA, due to SSD space limitations, but these can easily be accessed via symlinks. Overall this is a much better solution than I had previously and it's resolved the issues I was seeing with items being blocked as cross origin.

The only perplexing point is that if I click on the SSD user Library folder and hit cmd+i for information it tells me the folder is just 22mb, yet clicking on individual folders inside are much bigger. Mail alone is over 8 gigs. On the original SATA that user Library is around 50 gigs and I can see the available space on the SSD is now around 50 gigs less, so this seems to be some sort bug in the OS that is not reporting the correct folder/file size.

Another option is to use the ditto command from the terminal. This is what I use when I move user accounts. By the way, I have found that I needed to reset PRAM after changing the user account location in System Preferences->Users & Groups.

 

[ashleykaryl]

I wasn't familiar with the ditto command in the terminal, but that may be an easier solution if you are comfortable with the terminal. There was a small delay with the first restart following the switch, but everything worked with no great dramas. I'll try resetting the PRAM, just as a precaution.