How and why to move your home directory to a different partition
Introduction
Note: Please read this entire page before trying anything!
Moving your home directory to a separate partition can be very beneficial: if you ever need to reinstall OS X, you can simply format the OS X partition, reinstall OS X, and be up and running in less than an hour without having to spend time backing up your personal files. This entire task can be done with a few commands in the Terminal, and that is easier than explaining how to do more tasks in the Finder and NetInfo Manager. Type the following into the Terminal, substituting your username for "username" and the name of the other partition for "OtherPartition":
sudo ditto -rsrcFork /Users /Volumes/OtherPartition/Users
sudo niutil -createprop / /users/username home \
/Volumes/OtherPartition/Users/username
Don't go on until you're sure the new User directories are working OK. You should log out/back in to check this. The rm -dr command will remove the original Users Directory.
sudo rm -dr /Users
sudo ln -s /Volumes/OtherPartition/Users /Users
Creating new users
On some occasions, the Accounts Preference Pane may not create a directory for new users added to the system. So, if you create new users in the Accounts Pref Pane after executing the commands above and their home directories do not appear in the location you expected them to appear in, do the following:
- In the Terminal, create the user directory from the user template:
- Create the user account in the Accounts Preference Pane. You must use the same short name that you gave the user's home directory.
Jaguar:
sudo cp -R /System/Library/"User Template"/English.lproj \
/Volumes/OtherPartition/Users/username
10.1.x:
sudo cp -R /System/Library/UserTemplate/English.lproj \
/Volumes/OtherPartition/Users/username
Note that should execute the following command even if the user's home directory is created where you expect it to be created.
- Modify the NetInfo database for that user:
sudo niutil -createprop / /users/username home \
/Volumes/OtherPartition/Users/username
Specific issues
One reader has reported problems with the EndNote Add-on for Microsoft Word when it is installed in a Home directory not on the boot partition. If you have problems with Word crashing on startup, you may want to reverse this process and keep your home directory on the root partition.
Excel may have trouble opening files with Macros if you move your home directory to a separate partition.
