Moving OSX homefolder to another partition
During betatesting I need to re-install OSX roughly every 2 weeks. Its all no problem on my big machine where I have a seed partition and just let the OSX installer grab my user data from the old system. Also not much changes on this system inside the /User folder as all my changing things like email etc. are on the powerbook and this machine is only for production.
Yet on mentioned powerbook it has been a real pain. As I get many mails, chat logs and other stuff that changes in my roughly 2.9GB homefolder I have to manually back this up and then reinstall it and correct the permissions. I have been looking for some way to change this by having a symlink /User folder on a different partition. Now the Appleseeders came to help and gave me a link.
Here are the instructions on how to do it from the command line. Works well so far.
http://www.bombich.com/mactips/homedir.html
UPDATE:
After sifting through another beta install I thought I would like to enlighten the world with some more explanations then there are on the original webpage explaining how to move your system folder or how to choose a system folder on another partition without moving...
Obviously the following line (the ditto command) copies your user to "OtherPartition" which can also be a subfolder of said partition (/OtherPartition/Subfolder/User )
sudo ditto -rsrcFork /Users /Volumes/OtherPartition/Users
the next one is the important one that actually sets your user to the new directory in the netinfo utility:
sudo niutil -createprop / /users/username home \
/Volumes/OtherPartition/Users/username
then you delete your original user directory in /Users/... Only do this if you are certain that your moved directory works as expected (logging out and back in)
sudo rm -dr /Users
then you tell the OS and all Apps that your new /Users/ is in the new location via symlinking it.
sudo ln -s /Volumes/OtherPartition/Users /Users
But what if you didnīt copy the user but want to use a user that you moved from somehwere else (or moved before you installed OSX anew)?
1. Make a new temporary user with the name of the user you want to use.
2. Set owner of the directory that holds the user you want to use to the user you just created.
sudo chown createduser:admin /Volumes/OtherPartition/Users/wanteduser
3. Set permissions to read.write.execute user only.
sudo chmod 700 /Volumes/OtherPartition/Users/wanteduser
4. Put in the above.
sudo niutil -createprop / /users/username home \
/Volumes/OtherPartition/Users/wanteduser
5. Now you could delete your new User and symlink the new User Directory as seen above... I run it without it and have the created user as backup in there. I think that is a good way to do it...