Moving to a New Disk

After I installed the SSD into my iMac I wanted to restructure all the data I have a bit. The system should go on the SSD while all my data that’s currently stored in my home folder should go on the HDD. Lazy as I am, I did not want to re-install OS X and all the apps I’m using and let Time Machine copy all my data back.

I decided to do a clean OS X install from the Mac App Store and let the Migration Assistant do the rest. Naturally, not all of my data would fit onto the 128 GB SSD. So I decided to just import my settings, user profile and stuff but not the data itself. The plan was to then just move my home directory from the old disk to the root and configure my user account to use that directory as my home. Unfortunately, the 1 TB disc was not able to hold a copy second copy of my home directory. So I changed plans a bit.

I left the my profile at /Users/flohei/ and removed everything else from that HDD. If you want to do that as well keep in mind that there are a lot of hidden files and directories that you’ll probably not see using Finder. So you will probably want to use Terminal.app and rm -rf everything except for the Users directory.

You can change your home directory’s location by control-clicking your user in Users & Groups and selecting Advanced Options…. In there, go ahead and point Home directory to the new location. But be careful in here. You could screw up your profile.

When you’re done everything should behave as before. With the only exception that your data is now in a different place.