Move your home directory to another location
Changing the location of your home directory is pretty easy in Mac OS X:
* Launch System Preferences
* Click on ‘Accounts’
* Right-click or control-click your main user account and select ‘Advanced Options’
( Important Note: if you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t mess around in this screen! )
* Navigate down to ‘Home directory’ and see your default path as /user/David or whatever
* Click ‘Choose’ and navigate to the location you want to set as the new home directory path
* Click ‘OK’ and you’re all done!
Now as I mentioned before, if you don’t have a compelling reason to change the location of your home directory to somewhere else, don’t do it! You can really mess things up.
So why would you want to do this then? Well, there are various reasons why you’d want to move your home directory to somewhere else, here’s a few:
* OS X Daily reader Kemmon offers his reasons and great advice in the comments:
Moving home folders is a great way to establish disk quotas on a shared machine. I have four kids who share a Mac, so the drive has 5 partitions: One for the OS, and one for each kid. Their home folders are on their own partition, which sets a hard limit on how much disk space they can hog, and the OS partition is frozen with ARDs Deep Freeze. Permissions keeps each partition private form the others. 4 Kids sharing a Mac and NO maintenance issues for over 3 years! And if I ever want to do a clean install of the OS, I can re-format the OS partition without touching any home folders.
* You have a smaller Solid State boot drive and you want to conserve disk space, so you move your home directory to another drive source (obviously this isn’t practical on a Mac with only one internal hard disk). If you’re thinking of doing this, follow the guide below since there are some additional steps to take to be sure everything is flawless when changing your home directory location:
Moving home folders is a great way to establish disk quotas on a shared machine. I have four kids who share a Mac, so the drive has 5 partitions: One for the OS, and one for each kid. Their home folders are on their own partition, which sets a hard limit on how much disk space they can hog, and the OS partition is frozen with ARDs Deep Freeze. Permissions keeps each partition private form the others. 4 Kids sharing a Mac and NO maintenance issues for over 3 years! And if I ever want to do a clean install of the OS, I can re-format the OS partition without touching any home folders.
It’s not really a good idea to move your entire home folder to another drive if you want to gain significant speedups from an SSD since lots of small config etc. files are stored inside your home/Library/… folders.
Instead just move the big stuff (Pictures, Movies, Music) to another drive and symlink them back to your home folder.
Yeah, but it can be a really good idea if you want to use File Vault, and you’re already over 50% of your boot drive capacity, and the reason has nothing to do with Music/Movies/Pictures.
Yes but the control click on the user doesn’t work under OSX lion anymore. How to get around it?
It does work in Lion. Did you unlock the controlpanel before you control clicked?
I confirmed that it advanced user options works in OS LION, be sure to unlock the padlock prior.