Adding External Hard Drive - advice on structure/permissions?

[Dickie]

I've been running with my 2013 iMac for a while now, and its still more than up to the task of the workload but the internal SSD capacity is maxing out , so I'm adding an external desktop drive (probably one of the seagate spinning drives).
Even though I have it offloading to iCloud for most stuff, I need a local copy of things like the full Photo library so I can take a full backup (in case everything gets deleted)- I also have a backblaze cloud-based backup of this data just in case.

I'm presuming moving the whole user folders is a bad idea - as I only really want to move the infrequent access stuff, and leave the regular operational files local to the OS - so I'll relocate the libraries for each app individually (Photos, Music, Logic sound libraries etc).

Looking for any advice/experience on;

1) HFS+ or APFS (reading the threads here, I should keep APFS for SSD's only and stick with HFS+ for spinning drives)

2) The iMac and the external drive is shared by 3 people so would it be best to recreate the /users structure at the root of the external drive and set per-user permissions on the each subfolders? Or just have one shared area (and have OSX create per-user permissions on the fly)
I'm specifically thinking ahead if I replace the iMac in the future, I want to make sure I still have the correct permissions and access to the files and libraries I have moved across to the external drive (without having to mess around with resetting the permissions on thousands of objects etc.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Taz Mangus]

I have my user accounts on a separate partition. You could move the user accounts to a ex

I've been running with my 2013 iMac for a while now, and its still more than up to the task of the workload but the internal SSD capacity is maxing out , so I'm adding an external desktop drive (probably one of the seagate spinning drives).
Even though I have it offloading to iCloud for most stuff, I need a local copy of things like the full Photo library so I can take a full backup (in case everything gets deleted)- I also have a backblaze cloud-based backup of this data just in case.

I'm presuming moving the whole user folders is a bad idea - as I only really want to move the infrequent access stuff, and leave the regular operational files local to the OS - so I'll relocate the libraries for each app individually (Photos, Music, Logic sound libraries etc).

Looking for any advice/experience on;

1) HFS+ or APFS (reading the threads here, I should keep APFS for SSD's only and stick with HFS+ for spinning drives)

If you use a spinner stick with HFS+.

2) The iMac and the external drive is shared by 3 people so would it be best to recreate the /users structure at the root of the external drive and set per-user permissions on the each subfolders? Or just have one shared area (and have OSX create per-user permissions on the fly)
I'm specifically thinking ahead if I replace the iMac in the future, I want to make sure I still have the correct permissions and access to the files and libraries I have moved across to the external drive (without having to mess around with resetting the permissions on thousands of objects etc.

Thanks in advance!

I have all my user accounts on a separate partition, I have been doing that for years. If I need to reinstall the OS, I can clean install the OS without affecting the user accounts. I even have the Users/Shared on the separate partition.

In your case, if you are space challenged, doing some reorganization is probably a good idea to start.

The tricky part about moving the user accounts is making sure the permissions is correct for each user. Once you have the user accounts copied, go into System Preferences->User Accounts, control-click on a user, select "Advanced Options...". Set the "Home directory:" to where you moved the user account. After you reset the admin user account(s) home directory make sure to do a reset PRAM. I was having some strange issues when using the admin account until I reset PRAM.

 

[Dickie]

"I have all my user accounts on a separate partition, I have been doing that for years. If I need to reinstall the OS, I can clean install the OS without affecting the user accounts. I even have the Users/Shared on the separate partition."

I really like that idea - although I'd probably get nervous that if the external drive ever died I wouldnt even be able to logon as the administrator locally.
Maybe there's an interesting middle ground where I can reformat the internal SSD, and create 2 APFS partitions - like you proposed and use one for the OS , and another partition on the internal drive for the /users. Still keep the bulk of the external application libraries external but give me some wiggle room if I need to re-install the OS.

Thanks again for the advice! Much appreciated..

 

[Taz Mangus]

One thing you could do is create a special admin user that lives on the internal drive that would be used in the case that the external drive died. If you enable root user, that user always lives on the internal drive, you can't move it. I have root user enabled which I use in special cases, not used that often. And make sure you have periodic backups being done on its own drive.

How to enable the root user or change the root password on Mac - Apple Support

Mac administrators can use the root user account to perform tasks that require access to more areas of the system.

support.apple.com