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November 30, 2006

tips

Moving your home directory to a satellite office

Posted Nov. 30, ’06, 5:10 AM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Tips

Home Directory I recently got an 80GB Western Digital Raptor for a song. It’s a 10k RPM drive, meaning quick random access. Most people will agree it’s a terrific boot drive. The problem is, of course, that 80 GB is barely any space. The quick solution is to simply save all your data to a second hard drive.

However, that means you’re really abandoning your home directory. I don’t know about you, but I feel compelled to use it. Further, by default, some applications use it to save their data. What if you could use that second hard drive for your Users data? You have the bonus of all your data being shielded from a boot drive meltdown.

Dan Frakes pointed me at an article he wrote a while back. By all accounts, it works. I wanted to try it a different way. I’m already familiar with the fstab, so I felt a little more comfortable with it. Basically it breaks down to copying your Users directory (assuming your Users disk is named “Users”):

sudo ditto -v -rsrcFork /Users /Volumes/Users

Second, you make sure /etc/fstab exists, then add the line:

LABEL=Users /Users hfs rw 1 2

Next, you restart into single user mode (hold command-S). Follow the instructions to change files (fsck followed by a mount command). Then run the following commands:

cd /
mv Users Users-old
mkdir Users
chmod 775 Users

Restart again, then run the following command to load the fstab into the NetInfo database:

sudo niload -m fstab / < /etc/fstab

These instructions are for your edification. Before you try this, back up. Seriously. I don’t want you to lose your data playing with this. I now have separate home directory disk bliss.


4 Comments

Rob said:

Why not just create one, top level symlink in your home directory that points to your second hard drive? Far easier and less complicated, and no chance of losing your data in the process.

November 30, 2006 6:45 AM
Derik Author Profile Page said:

Because that's not much better than not using your home directory at all. All the stuff that's hardwired to specific places in your home directory (iChat dumps logs into Document, Apache uses your Sites directory) is still going to waste space on my boot disk. Will it exceed 80 GB? Possibly and I'd rather not think about it.

November 30, 2006 9:00 AM
Derik Author Profile Page said:

Rob, that's actually the method that Dan describes. I'm not really convinced it's all that much simpler. I actually like the fstab method because the Users folder disappears from the boot drive's directory listing all together. Spooky.

December 1, 2006 10:16 AM

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