Can External Home Folder Data Drive be APFS?

[gadgetfreak98]

Hi all. After my 4,1–>5,1 Mac Pro quit, I have taking the plunge with a Mac Mini and externalizing a whole bunch of things that were inside my Mac Pro, including a video card via a Razor eGPU (works fine) and putting my data drives into an Akitio TB3 enclosure.

My Mac Mini hosts the System and Applications on the internal SSD. The Home Folder is hosted on a 4TB spinning disk, just like it was on my Mac Pro. This works fine.

The issue is I want to retire the spinning disk and replace it with an SSD. I was able to get a good deal on a Samsung drive to do just that.

I have tried cloning the old drive to the SSD separately with Carbon Copy Cloner and then just dragging info over from drive to drive. Unfortunately upon redesignating the SSD as the location of my Home Folder via advanced options in Users, and then restarting, I get errors that I cannot log into my account.

I first tried formatting the data drive as APFS (encrypted). When that failed as I described, I thought maybe it was the encryption, so I did regular APFS. Same result.

Is it impossible to do this under APFS? Any other thoughts? Thanks!

 

[treekram]

There are problems having the home folder on an external disk while booting from an internal disk. What was suggested was that the external isn't mounted when the OS looks for the home directory upon login. The workaround is to have your home directory on the internal disk and then have symbolic links to the external disk for the folders with the largest amount of files. I'm not sure about the Library folder and if it can be moved to the external. If possible, you should probably keep this on the internal SSD.

 

[gadgetfreak98]

Following up on my own thread... Seems that APFS unencrypted — and then just a copy of one drive to the other — not a CCC clone, worked fine... Much snappier! Seems like my Mac Mail that never quits problem is gone!