Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

Gamoe · Aug 26, 2011, 05:57 PM

My desire is to have my OS & Apps and my own data separate, either on two partitions or two different physical hard drives. This makes it a lot easier to backup and save only what's important. But Mac OS X just doesn't seem to be built for that. It seems to expect for everything- apps and data- to be on the same disk.

I'm wondering if anyone here has made this setup actually work and any issues that have come up and how they were resolved.

Uncle Skeleton · Aug 26, 2011, 09:42 PM

I guess it depends on what personal data you're talking about. I have a small disk with the OS and everything, and a big disk with data. Whenever I'm prompted to save a document, I put it on my big disk (but only because it happens to be bigger, not because of compartmentalization). I have it the way you're asking, without ever having thought about it, so in my experience OS X doesn't interfere with it at all. I don't use the iApps, but then I bet they all have a place where you can change where their library folders are at. So... what exactly is standing in your way?

turtle777 · Aug 26, 2011, 09:57 PM

If you use Carbon Copy Cloner, you can make backups excluding the data in your home folder.

However, you should not exclude ~/Library/, as this contains important data for your account.

-t

Gamoe · Aug 27, 2011, 12:14 AM

Originally Posted by Uncle Skeleton

I guess it depends on what personal data you're talking about. I have a small disk with the OS and everything, and a big disk with data. Whenever I'm prompted to save a document, I put it on my big disk (but only because it happens to be bigger, not because of compartmentalization). I have it the way you're asking, without ever having thought about it, so in my experience OS X doesn't interfere with it at all. I don't use the iApps, but then I bet they all have a place where you can change where their library folders are at. So... what exactly is standing in your way?

I've heard people complain. I think it's mostly the iApps, but as you say, I figure one can change the locations. I'm worried that Time Machine won't be of much use to me then, since I don't believe it will back up a non-bootable disk. But I suppose I could use another more versatile backup tool instead.

Uncle Skeleton · Aug 27, 2011, 11:12 AM

As I recall, I had to change Time Machine to stop backing up my non-boot disks.

But this raises the question: why are you doing this again? In your first post you said it was so you can roll your own back-ups. If you are using Time Machine, then there seems to be no point in this whole exercise?

I'm not trying to be nosy (that is a fringe benefit

), but it's just ever so much easier to be helpful when the motivation is known.

Gamoe · Aug 27, 2011, 12:12 PM

Originally Posted by Uncle Skeleton

As I recall, I had to change Time Machine to stop backing up my non-boot disks.

But this raises the question: why are you doing this again? In your first post you said it was so you can roll your own back-ups. If you are using Time Machine, then there seems to be no point in this whole exercise?

I'm not trying to be nosy (that is a fringe benefit

), but it's just ever so much easier to be helpful when the motivation is known.

No prob & thanks for the feedback.

Time Machine isn't the problem. I want to separate my "important" data from the rest so that backups can be quicker, smaller, potentially more portable, and isolated from what is essentially "noise" as far as backups are concerned. For some reason, I figured it wouldn't work under these conditions, but as long as it does I'll continue to use Time Machine, although i may supplement that with another backup method just for redundancy's sake.

I had read something a while back that made me think it would be a hassle to move a home folder/user data away from the boot drive, but I'm now pleasantly surprised to find that that's not the case. I'm very glad to hear it works well for you.

Uncle Skeleton · Aug 28, 2011, 02:52 PM

Oh I get it. In that case, my guess is that it will Just Work™ (except for where you have to tell each app one by one to move their "library" to a new location, if they have one)

Gamoe · Sep 11, 2011, 06:24 PM

I made two partions- a "system" and a "user" drive and separated my home folder accordingly. Everything has worked out fine until today. I booted the iMac, logged in and was presented with a "default" account instead of my own, even though it claimed to be my account. Keep in mind that my home folder is on the same physical drive, only on a separate partition, so I would think there would be no significant delay in accessing the home folder.

I checked to see if my true home folder and its partition was still there. It was. I checked to see if the system had created a new default home folder for me on either partition. It hadn't. I checked to see if the path was correct for the home folder in Users and Groups. It was. I rebooted. Same thing. I figure I would try everything and I went back to the preference pane.

Even though the path was correct, I clicked on the "Choose..." button to the right of the Home Directory path and again chose my home folder. It was the same exact path, but it added a space and a "1" after the volume name. I rebooted and everything was back to normal. Does anyone have any idea why the system felt the need to rename the drive (though it still shows up as its original name in the Finder)? It seems there are certain glitches to contend with in this setup.

Uncle Skeleton · Sep 12, 2011, 01:18 PM

Originally Posted by Gamoe

but it added a space and a "1" after the volume name.

This is what always happens when a volume gets mounted and another mounted volume already has the same name. I don't know why that happened this time, but it's not totally out of the blue.

P · Sep 12, 2011, 01:30 PM

More specifically, the " 1" renaming happens if there is already a folder by that name in that location. This can happen whenever the drive is not correctly unmounted, e.g. in a crash. Very annoying until you figure it out. Open Terminal, navigate to /Volumes and you will see the old folder there next to the old one. Remove it (rmdir is the command) and reboot, and your drive should be back to normal.

There is a workaround for this, if it's really bothering you. It involves editing the /etc/fstab file to manually mount the drive in the same location every time. Read up on "man fstab" if you're interested.

Waragainstsleep · Sep 12, 2011, 03:12 PM

I'd like to do this with my MBP at some point. I want to get an SSD and move my current boot drive into the ODD slot where I currently have a spare 250GB HDD.

I was planning to move my iTunes library and probably my documents folder to the data disk. Maybe iPhoto library too. That takes care of most of my data. All my mail is IMAP so its backed up on the server and other client Macs. I could move the whole user folder of course but this just strikes me as asking for trouble.