Moving Your Users Directory - OSX Leopard - Part 1


Part 1 - Short and Sweet

Part 2 - Step by Step with System Configuration Guide

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Written by Rick Stephens

  All tasks in this guide are to be performed at the readers risk. It is possible to make your data difficult or impossible to access. Or if improperly performed you can even permanently erase your data files. No guarantee is implied or rendered, especially since we are not doing the work ourselves. Your results are dependent on your proper understanding and implementation of the suggestions made in this guide. We advise you do nothing until you fully read and understand the procedures in this guide and have an independent backup of your data. Mistakes happen, preventing data loss with prudent backups is one of life's keys to success.

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Moving your Users Directory:

  You can relocate your Users Directory, which is the folder where all the individual users' Home Directories are located, to any attached hard drive on your Mac. There are quite a few reasons that this is advantageous, the two primary ones that come to mind are improved performance and better data security. This page will not go into depth on how to configure the drives for best purpose, but only how to move and then set the new path to the new user's Home location. We'll leave the detailed system performance and configuration guidelines with step by step procedures to Part 2.

Step One - Copy Users to new Location:

  First, in Finder, create a new empty folder called 'Users' on the hard drive or partition where you wish to relocate. Then use your copy program of choice (CCC, SuperDuper, ChronoSync, SyncPro... etc) to copy your original Users folder and all its contents into the new Users folder.     old Users -> new Users

Step Two - Link to new User Location:

  Leopard makes this really easy. Open System Preferences. Go to Account Preferences. Click the lock to make changes and enter your Admin Users password. Right click on the user's name that you wish to change the Home Directory path and open the Advanced Options window. Your Home Directory line will show the path:

     /Users/name

For 'name' you will see the users short name.
My short user name is ricks, so on my computer the default path is:       /Users/ricks

We are going to edit that path to read:

     /Volumes/volume name/Users/name

For 'volume name' enter the name of the drive or partition where you copied the new Users Directory.
On my computer that hard drive name is 'Local' - so on my computer the path becomes:    /Volumes/Local/Users/ricks




  You can also use the button and navigate to your new User Directory. Use the Navigation window to work your way to your new User folder and select your Home directory. Clicking Open will fill in the path for you. Check it to make sure the path shown matches the guidelines listed above.

  Repeat the 'resetting the path' process for each User that you are moving.

Restart to Activate.

  After a restart you will now be operating from the new location for your Home Directory. To make a quick check that it indeed is operating off the new location, do a Get Info on your Home Directory in the Finder Sidebar. It will indicate the path in the 'Where:' field under General.

For more Detailed Guidance, go to Page 2

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