Filed under: Terminal Tips, TUAW Tips
TUAW Tip: Moving your home folder to another disk (or moving it back)
In ye olde times, with "Mack OSe 9," many users chose to keep their personal files, work, and documents on a different physical disk from their startup disk. It was a safety measure: If one disk goes down, at least the other won't. There was no structural reason to keep files in a particular disk location, other than keeping them out of the System Folder.
I visited a client yesterday whose drive scheme was set up exactly like this, and he wanted to be (finally) upgraded to Leopard. I wasn't sure how Leopard would handle the fact that his Users folder had been moved to a different drive, so (knowing I had backups of his entire system) I cautiously proceeded with the installation.
After the installer finished, Leopard had created a fresh, blank Users folder on the startup disk with a home folder bearing the same username. This wasn't exactly the answer I was looking for. I had to link, somehow, the new Users/hisname folder with his existing user folder on the other volume.
Turns out, Leopard handles this much better than previous versions of Mac OS X. Read on to find out how.
Continue reading “TUAW Tip: Moving your home folder to another disk (or moving it back)”
This tip could
definitely be classified as rudimentary to some, but I thought it would be handy to shed some light on a folder in the
Home directory that is rarely opened by many users: the Library. For those who sometimes wonder things such as where
Safari stores your bookmarks or where Mail.app keeps all those messages you never reply to, your Library folder is
calling your name. The Library in your Home folder is where Mac OS X stores all the data you enter into almost any and
every application you use. Take a look at ~/Library/Safari, for example (the (~) stands for your Home folder). In there
is just about everything Safari stores for you, including your bookmarks and history. There are plenty of other handy
folders to check out in your Library, such as the Fonts folder which stores all the fonts you install, but I think the
real meat of the Library is the Application Support folder. This is where most applications will store their
information, such as Adium extras, Camino/Firefox bookmarks, NetNewsWire subscription information and the database file
iWeb uses to create your website.
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