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Downloading to desktop on partition

rainman::|:|

rainman::|:|

macrumors 603
Original poster
Hey all,

I partitioned my system yesterday, the internal hard drive for the OS and the external partitioned for music, documents, etc. I want all of the non-essential files on the external, so I aliased many of the folders in my Home folder to a partion, including the Desktop folder. My browsers are set to download to the desktop, and now neither one will! I've set in Explorer (netscape won't let me set it) a new Desktop path, bypassing the alias, but it still gives me an error. Can browsers simply not download to a different hard drive (i have not yet moved the apps off of the internal) or is there some other problem? was it incredibly stupid of me to alias the desktop? everything else seems to work fine...

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated... I can download to my / directory but i'd like it to go straight to the external. I'm sure others here have said they do this....

Thanks!
pnw
 
alias

ok... you aliased your home directory to the external drive? Aliasing does not move files pysicaly to another drive.. it just points to files located on your interenal drive... its so you can get to them when your looking at your external drive.

Yes.. you can set your downloads to go to a defualt directory... I dont think that its a browser setting. If I remember right is an internet preffrence in the preffernece app. Ill take a look when I get home and get back to you.
 
Are you using 9 or X paul? You could easily select the external drive every time you download something (ala Chimera) or by going into downloading preference in Internet Explorer. This will allow you to download directly to your FW (I presume) so as to save internal HD space. If you add that folder to your favorites (9 or X) you'll be able to select it immediately when you go to download.
I guess the Desktop Folder alias could work, but that could bit a little part of the problem too. Why not just alias the folders inside the Desktop, so as to avoid having a direct Desktop alias as such.

Have a great Day! 😀 😀 😀 😀
 
Try this...

/Volumes/PartitionName/Desktop/

Thing is though, OS X only shows what's in your User's Desktop folder on the Desktop...

Is this what you're after?
 
I decided against aliasing my entire home directory, i thought the library would be a mess if i did that, so i moved some of the directories (Desktop, music, pictures, documents) and their contents to the external HD and created aliases to them in my Home directory. Everything else works well, when i move a file to the desktop it's stored on the external HD, etc. The whole idea behind this is that when i go to format the internal hard drive, say for future upgrades, i wont have to worry about moving and backing up my files...

Okay, huh, I just tried saving a file to a different location on that partition, as well as the desktop again, and it worked this time. What the hell...

Ah well, thanks for the help, it corrected itself evidently... has anyone else experienced anything like this?

😕
🙂
pnw
 
I tried that too

I wanted to do the same thing. If I wanted to upgrade my OS, i didnt want to touch my data files ( pictures, movies, music etc).. Don't even think of moving Library to another partition. If you do, the preferenecs won't be updated ( for example if you add a new icon to dock, when you log out and log on , it will loose that changes )

I had problems moving my "Sites" folder as well..i was not able to access the localhost to view my webpages.

I tried Desktop as well, it didnt work. So here is my solution. I created a "Downloads" folder in the data partition and put an alias on the desktop. all my downloads go to that directory. That way it won't clutter my desktop. That works for me.

..
 
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