[Tee]

Is my Home directory the best place to save all of my data or might there be any benefit to putting it at the top level of my disk or even in the Users/Shared directory or elsewhere?

I'm the only person that uses my PB and I only have one user account established. Although I might create a TroubleShooting account as many folks recommend.

If I did need to login using the the TroubleShooting acct would I have access to the files stored in the Home dir of my primary acct?

Any suggestions?

[Cipher13]

Yeah, just keep 'em in your Home dir. That's what it's there for. No reason not to.

[si_lance]

keeping stuff in your home dir is a good idea because it centralizes where to find stuff AND you can more easily do backups. cron a tar gzip job and move it somewhere off the machine (cd, ftp, nfs, etc.) as far as getting to your files from the trouble shooting account, you can su (switch user) from command line and get any file you want.

[hadocon]

Originally posted by si_lance:
as far as getting to your files from the trouble shooting account, you can su (switch user) from command line and get any file you want.

Of course you could also do a "Get Info" on the directory you want to access and change the permissions... No need 4 the terminal.

[si_lance]

Originally posted by hadocon:
No need 4 the terminal.

there is always need for the terminal...

it's the only reason why I even switched to mac ... OS X's unix underpinnings!

[curmi]

Generally, if they are your personal files, keep them in your area. That means in your home dir. Your Desktop is actually in your home dir, so you can keep them on the desktop even if you like, or in a folder on your desktop etc.

Whatever you feel comfortable with, and whatever makes you work better on the machine.

[gatorparrots]

If you keep all your documents in your home directory, beware... Apple has released errant installers or updaters in the past that have nuked photo and music libraries, mail, setttings, etc. in user's home directories. The key to avoid such a catastrophe is frequent periodic backups.

[Graymalkin]

Even if you've only got a single user on your system it is still a good idea to keep your personal files in your home directory. It keeps them centralized for easy access and backup. You can also set your home directory to any device on the computer, including an external hard drive, separate partition, or network drive.

[Tee]

Originally posted by Graymalkin:
...You can also set your home directory to any device on the computer, including an external hard drive, separate partition, or network drive.

I was considering creating a special partition dedicated just to my Home directory.

I have seen snippets of terminal commands apparently needed to do this, and I was too scared to do it. Is it officially supported by Apple?

[Graymalkin]

There's actually no commands in the terminal really needed. You can set the user directory via NetInfo Manager. You authenticate yourself, go to users, then the specific user you want to change. if your external drive was named Hufflepuff you'd change the line to /Volumes/Hufflepuff. The external drive would always need to be powered on an connected for you to use it as a home directory however. Apple supports putting your home directory on an external drive as much as they support it on an internal drive. I helped my friend set this up on his iMac DV. It's only got a 10GB drive but he's got an external 40GB drive that houses his home folder.

[ginoledesma]

Originally posted by si_lance:

there is always need for the terminal...

it's the only reason why I even switched to mac ... OS X's unix underpinnings!

Not everyone needs the Terminal. I know a lot of people who get by with Mac OS X without so much as even knowing the Terminal is there. There are some things that might be done faster using the Terminal, but more often than not, they can be done using the standard user interface anyway.

Keeping all your files (and here I'm referring to YOUR files, like documents, and not applications) within the Home directory, as others already mentioned, is a good idea because everything's there. When backing up, you need not go looking everywhere to make sure your data is backed up. Simply drag your Home folder for backing up and that's that.

Apple neither explicitly supports nor discourages the use of dedicated partitions for "special directories" like the Users directory. I usually have my Home folder separate from the rest of the system because of an old habit of mine. There's no true "advantage" or "disadvantage" other than having to do additional steps to get that setup. Whether one partition or disk fails leads to more or less the same problems anyway.

As its on a personal (one-person) mac, there's really no need to do partitioning, unless you intend to have partitions for troubleshooting purposes. Partitioning, I've noticed, tends to get in the way of several users in the long run who don't plan well enough when running into space shortage.

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by si_lance:

there is always need for the terminal...

it's the only reason why I even switched to mac ... OS X's unix underpinnings!

I hate to break it to you, but I think they may have a couple of Unix-based operating systems on the PC, too....

[powerbook867]

Tee, I'm a big fan of two partitions on a machine for one simple reason. Backup. I have an 80 gig firewire harddrive and once every couple of weeks I do a drag and drop of my whole data partition to the external drive. Apple in the past has made some mistakes with the home directory, but I'm more concerned about a drive wetting the bed...This is the way I used to setup machine for all my end users when I was deskside support for an engineering division of my company. Plus, if the OS craps out for any reason, the issues should hopefully stay away from your data....just my opinion...

[Millennium]

There is no benefit to keeping your files outside your homedir, and as others have notedx, plenty of benefits to keeping them there.

The best way around Apple's shoddy installer QA, however, is to do what I do: don't touch any update for three days. By that point, if there are problems, others will have found them. So far I've been lucky with every update I've installed -even if I installed it early by mistake- but it's still a Good Idea.

[Toyin]

I'll go against the grain here. Keep everything in your home directory if you don't use filevault. Filevault gave me a lot of problems when I had my music library (15gb) in my home folder. You can read about it in this thread.. Basically when you get a drive that's more than half full you can run into problems with filevault.

I also had a noticeable slow down with iTunes when my music folder was in my home directory and filevault was enabled. I'm currently filevault free and keep all my files within my home folder.

[york28]

Put it all in your home directory, unless you have flders of a large size that aren't important. Example: My music files (mp3s) wieght in at 10 gigs and my photos around 4 gigs. I keep my photos in my home directory so they get backed up, but my music is on another partition beacause I can replace it fairly easily, and I don't want to be backing it up all of the time.

[si_lance]

Originally posted by Chuckit:
I hate to break it to you, but I think they may have a couple of Unix-based operating systems on the PC, too....

What do you think I use when I'm on a pee cee. I was originally a Linux fan, but I'm growing pretty fond of OS X. Learning the command line is always a bonus. Yes, you don't need to know it to fully use OS X, but it sure makes things make more sense.

[philzilla]

my Home directory shapes up like so:

Desktop
Documents
Downloads
Fonts
Library
Movies
Music
Pictures
Projects
Public
Sites

far easier to just be able to drag the whole thing to another machine, when i need to do backups, or whatever.