Can I Move home folder of Mac SSD to another disk?

If you want to move home folder of your Mac OS X SSD drive to another disk than it is advisable not to try same but something similar a way better.

As you know SSDs are fast than traditional drives that is a big reason of increasing number of Mac heads is buying them. When you choose to move your home folder (full of docs, photos, songs and movies) to some external drive, they fail to understand that there’s Library in the home folder that should be left on SSD. Library is a collection of caches, settings and contains supporting files for those apps we want start up faster.

And that's not the only reason or you can say the story doesn't end here. In a big iTunes library, you might want to keep its contents like ~/Music/iTunes/ on the SSD too. (excluding iTunes Music). I said excluding iTunes music because it loads faster and you can't even see its icon bounce.

There’s a simpler way to do all this but without moving your home folder. It can be done by moving most of its contents and then use symboliclinks point to the new location. 

 

Symbolic links are created in the Terminal, and one can remember this syntax: ln -s

<where-to-link-to> or <what-to-call-it>

So let’s perform it in a form of a checklist with 7 easy steps:

The first most important step is quiting all apps and stop your Dropbox etc.

1. Open Finder to access your home folder. Now, select everything except Library in your Home folder.Now, drag all your selected content to the new storage drive.

2. After copying is done, delete everything from your home folder except for Library and Music/iTunes.

3. Open Terminal. Right now you should be in your home folder. Now start linking:  

ln -s /Volumes/StorageDisk/Downloads
You have your first symbolic link. You can look at it in Finder.

4. Now, do the same for all other content that you’ve moved: Documents, Movies, Pictures, Sites, Dropbox etc. except for the Music.

5. Finished it with #5? Now for Music, delete iTunes Music either from the Finder or Terminal doesn’t matter. Now, can create a symbolic link to iTunes Music on the storage:
cd Music/iTunesln -s “/Volumes/StorageDisk/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music”

The best part of doing this way is: you don’t need to change anything in your daily workflow. Everything is in the form to which you’re used to.

Remember to run your Dropbox again.

Note: Before moving, migrating data from one folder to another, or from one drive to another it is recommended to create clone of Mac drive using some reliable tool. Creating Copy of Mac applications using reliable software ensure you bootable clone of your programs .