up vote 0 down vote favorite
share [g+] share [fb]

I currently have a mac, running Mac OS X, with one hard drive. My home directory is encrypted with FileVault and then I have a /Users/Shared that is not encrypted and is readable by other users (i.e.: my wife).

I'm considering going to a dual hard drive setup to have an SSD as boot (maybe a 40GB drive) while still containing a big disk (500GB) for the rest of the data. That means that now my home would be in a very tiny drive.

What are my options to have a sensible layout? Can I mount the big drive as /Users? Can I move the encrypted image to the other drive? both?

link|improve this question
69% accept rate
feedback

1 Answer

up vote 1 down vote

Under System Preferences if you choose a login and right-click on it for Advanced Options you get a form including a field giving the path name to its home directory.

So you can put your users on the large drive, using as example /Volumes/SecondDrive/x

An alternative I have used is to make a symbolic link from /Users/mark to the other drive - does mean that the sloppy bad programming way of getting the home directory would work. However I doubt FileVault would work here.

link|improve this answer
I was advised against it saying some apps may not understand the home being somewhere else and I was also told that the encrypted image is not the /Users directory, so moving it won't help there. Any ideas? – J. Pablo Fernández Jun 4 '10 at 10:25
See edit for dealing with badly written programs. I don't understand your comment here re FileVault – Mark Jun 4 '10 at 10:37
When you encrypt /Users/pupeno, files are not stored in /Users/pupeno anymore, they are stored in an disk image. If the disk image is in /var/encrypted_images/, then no matter where /Users is, the data will end up in the primary disk. – J. Pablo Fernández Jun 4 '10 at 12:12
Perhaps you can delete /var/encrypted_images and make it a link to the other disk – Mark Jun 4 '10 at 14:59
Yes, if I find it. – J. Pablo Fernández Jun 5 '10 at 9:03
feedback

Your Answer

 
or
required, but never shown
discard

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.