Has anyone tried running their Home directory from an external SSD on a modern Mac? I have a M4 Mac mini with 500GB of internal space. It’s doing fine, but over time I seem to be gradually losing disc space (now down to under 200GB available).
I have OneDrive which contains most of my files. I have about 30 GB stored on that current, but it could go up to over 1 TB. I like to have all of those cloud files stored on my computer so I can back them up (to both Time Machine daily and offline). Now that Apple seems to require the cloud services to sync to the Home directory, storing those on an external drive seems to be required over time.
These restrictions are becoming very frustrating with Apple. It’s getting hard to just take care of my basic tasks: syncing files between devices and cloud services, backing up files, and flexible storage options. Has anyone found a good way to operate within these constraints?
I should note that I’m currently running my Home directory from an external drive, I’m just not sure what issues I may run into.
I did this some years ago on an Intel Mac mini. I moved my home directory to an external SSD and had no problems at all. I do recommend you do not delete your home directory on the internal drive.
Just delete the data in your original home directory, AFTER you confirm that everything is working correctly.
As I said, it’s been several years but the following appears to be the same steps I used. Start with making sure your backups are up to date.
Some other opinions:
FYI: I sync Google Drive files to an external SSD.
I can only agree, particularly as where I live the only broadband connectivity is over the mobile network; too far from the local exchange for the old copper landline to support broadband and too few people for anyone to run fibre.
I’m playing with some options at the moment the better to connect my old Intel iMac, a new Mac laptop that will replace it (when I can afford it) and a new Linux box. SyncThing is looking to be a good option. One thing I like is that you can choose which directories to sync to which devices; I do different things on my different devices and I neither need nor want everything in my Documents directory everywhere. There is also a third party iOS client (Möbius sync but I’ve not tried it, either on my phone or iPad.
Just for info, the Linux box I’m using is a mini PC the same size as the old Mac mini, but with 64Gb and 2Tb of NVME (as two drives, both upgradable) and an AMD Ryzen 9 processor, all the less than the base model Mac Mini. I know very well it’s comparing apples and pears on the processor/ performance front, but given I don’t do serous photography, let alone video, and never fully max out the (now 10 year old) Intel chip in my iMac, disk wins over CPU for me. One disk is OS plus home directory, the other is mounted for direct access and available as a network mount point.
On which point, does anyone have experience with NFS on macOS? I’m using SMB, but that does mean no extended file attributes are available (xattrs are used for tags).
I keep expecting it all to break sometime, which will result in much wailing and gnashing of teeth, but so far so good…
As an old school IT person, I keep all data from my Mac mini (where it gets backed up) on a separate partition on a Raid array with photos on an SSD.
This keeps my internal drive pretty clean and ensures I don’t need to manage that internal drive much, which at 250GB and serving as a Plex Server is pretty snug.
