Applications that let you save their content to another drive

[Silly John Fatty]

First post of the year, so happy new year all of you!

I was wondering which of all applications for Mac allow you to save their contents or libraries to another drive.
I know that iPhoto does for example. What about iTunes? Can you save content to somewhere else? And Mail?

Thanks.

 

[sharon22]

YES! But each application is different, and to find out how to do this (for each application), it will involve Googling. Here's what I typed (no quotation marks):

itunes save data another drive

And here's your answer:

http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT4527

And, then for mail, you could do:

mail save data another drive

etc., etc.

Happy New Year!

 

[Silly John Fatty]

Thanks! But actually that only shows how to move your library to another drive. I know that you can move your iTunes library somewhere else, on an external drive, I just found out how to do. But I'm wondering if it's just the music itself or if it also includes stuff like backups for iPhones and iPads for example.

Basically, what I want is not to move it forever somewhere else, but more like store it somewhere, while iTunes still being able to access everywhere normally. It's just to not overload my SSD with unimportant things.

I'd like to do the same with Mail but I haven't figured out how to do that yet. I don't think it's officially supported, there's one feature called "Export Mailbox" but that's something else…

 

[Jon-PDX]

It sounds like you would like to move all your " user data" to another location other than your SSD. If your computer has more than one hard drive (internal, not external) you can move your "Home folder" to that drive. You could probably move it to an external drive I personally would not feel comfortable doing that.

I did that when I installed an SSD as my boot drive. It's been that way for a long time and it works perfectly.

But, be warned that there are mixed opinions on doing it. Also I'm on Mountain lion. I do have other drives with Mavericks and Yosemite on them and when I pointed those to my home folder it did appear to be ok. But I only tried it to see if it would work. Which it did.

Anyway if you want to know what is involved have a look at this article....

http://macs.about.com/od/diyguidesprojects/qt/Move-Your-Home-Folder-To-A-New-Location.htm

That's basically how I did it with two exceptions.

1). I renamed my old home folder and did not delete it for a week or two just to be safe.

2). Instead of saving a text file directly to the new location of my home folder as suggested in the article I just saved it to the desktop. I then navigated to the new location to make sure it was saved there.

If you decide to do it make double sure you have backups of all important data. Especially things that you can't replace.

Jon...

 

[Silly John Fatty]

I didn't even know you could do this! I mean I didn't know you could select this in the System Preferences, so it looks like it's an official solution?

I remember that some time back I've wanted to do this with my iMac and an external drive. But people said it would be a bad idea.
This time I would like the stuff to be on an internal HDD, and yes your guess was correct, I'd like to have as little as possible of the User Data on the SSD.

The problem is that I use this computer mainly for Logic Pro, so if I move all the user data to the HDD, Logic will be there as well – but I'd like to have it on the SSD.
It sucks that for Apps from the App Store you can't choose where to save them, like when you install a normal applications, during the installation process, you usually get a window that asks you where (on which drive/volume) you'd like to save it.

 

[Fishrrman]

It is technically possible to move your home folder to another drive, but...

Unless you REALLY know what you are doing, it's better to NOT do so.

It could present some vexing and serious problems on down the line someday...

 

[Jon-PDX]

Fishrrman is correct, you do need to be careful and know what you are doing if you move your home folder. If in doubt don't do it. But it is an option if you can't find another solution.

Regarding Logic Pro, I've never used that software. But I suspect all the data would move with the home folder along with everything else except the applications themselves which stay on the boot drive.

Since you want to keep all the Logic Pro data on the SSD you're probably better off just moving the data for iTunes, iPhoto, Mail (depending on the program you use), etc... to another drive since those are usually the ones that take up the most space.

Regarding your question(s) about moving iTunes and iPhone/iPad backups I've never done it but I suspect it's only the library data that gets relocated. Which makes sense since that's the majority of the data that takes up space.

Jon...

 

[Silly John Fatty]

Fishrrman is correct, you do need to be careful and know what you are doing if you move your home folder. If in doubt don't do it. But it is an option if you can't find another solution.

Regarding Logic Pro, I've never used that software. But I suspect all the data would move with the home folder along with everything else except the applications themselves which stay on the boot drive.

Since you want to keep all the Logic Pro data on the SSD you're probably better off just moving the data for iTunes, iPhoto, Mail (depending on the program you use), etc... to another drive since those are usually the ones that take up the most space.

Regarding your question(s) about moving iTunes and iPhone/iPad backups I've never done it but I suspect it's only the library data that gets relocated. Which makes sense since that's the majority of the data that takes up space.

Jon...

Hmm yes your solution with only moving data for iTunes, iPhoto etc. would have been my second option and I believe it's what I'm going to do.
iTunes and iPhoto libraries are easy to move (in the preferences), Mail I barely use on that computer and the mail library is very small so I'll simply leave it there. The desktop will not be used, all other documents can be moved to the HDD and I can add a "Documents" folder in the side bar, and even the downloads folder can be defined in mail and Safari. I think that is a good solution

----------

As for backups, do you mean they are not moved somewhere else? I do think backups can be quite big, I will still make my backups on that mac. My iPhone is 32 GB and my iPad 128, so that's quite some data there in total! Perhaps there's an option to make backups on other drives.

 

[Jon-PDX]

Sorry for the delay in responding.

Regarding iTunes iOS backups,

Yes I believe iOS device backups are kept in a separate location and not in the iTunes media/library folder. So the backups for your iPhone and and other iOS devices would remain on your boot drive (someone correct me if I'm wrong).

I wouldn't worry too much about the size of those myself. From what I remember, from within iTunes you can delete older backups if you don't need them anymore. So if they start to take up too much space, and your not having any problems with your devices, you could just delete some of the older ones and keep your more recent ones incase you need to do a restore.

Hope that helps,

Jon...

 

[Silly John Fatty]

Sorry for the delay in responding.

Regarding iTunes iOS backups,

Yes I believe iOS device backups are kept in a separate location and not in the iTunes media/library folder. So the backups for your iPhone and and other iOS devices would remain on your boot drive (someone correct me if I'm wrong).

I wouldn't worry too much about the size of those myself. From what I remember, from within iTunes you can delete older backups if you don't need them anymore. So if they start to take up too much space, and your not having any problems with your devices, you could just delete some of the older ones and keep your more recent ones incase you need to do a restore.

Hope that helps,

Jon...

Hi, thanks.

Usually I always keep one backup per device. That seems to be automatic because I never deleted any, but always only see one for each device. Perhaps there's a setting for that.

But what I wanted to say was that if I made a backup of my iPad, which has 128 GB, and let's say those 128 GB were full, and then another backup of my full 32 GB iPhone, that would mean I have 160 GB of backups already, no?

 

[Jon-PDX]

Hi, thanks.

But what I wanted to say was that if I made a backup of my iPad, which has 128 GB, and let's say those 128 GB were full, and then another backup of my full 32 GB iPhone, that would mean I have 160 GB of backups already, no?

That's a good question. I would think they were full backups but to be honest I've never bothered to check.

Standby…….

Just looked and they appear to be full backup's but not everything is backed up (see link below for more information)

Example: I have ~32 GB of data on my iPad (18 GB of that is video) but I just did a backup and the folder for that backup is only 1.8 GB in size. And my "Mobile sync" folder which contains 16 backups at this time is only 15.5 GB in size.

So it appears the really large files like movies, etc… are not backed up when you sync/backup the device in iTunes. If you move your iTunes media to another drive those things will be in that new location assuming you have imported them to iTunes.

For more information on what is backed up and the location of the folder(s) where they are kept see this Apple article.

Create and delete iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch backups in iTunes

Jon…

 

[Silly John Fatty]

Silly me, of course you are right. I know why the video is not in the backup: Because videos and photos do not get backed up through iTunes, but through iPhoto. Which is practical because you can easily locate a place for your iPhoto library, i.e. outside of the SSD.

It also makes sense why your backups are so small. The only thing that could take space in those backups is the music. But then again, even that library can be moved as it seems. And the rest would be just really small stuff.