Creating Home Folder on External Drive

[parkds]

Hoping someone might be able to help me with permission issues I am having while migrating my home folder to an external drive.

I am in the process of upgrading from a very aging iMac to a new Mac Mini. I didn't want to pay the outlandish premium Apple sells their SSD for, so I opted instead to purchase an external, USB C SSD drive for a fraction of the cost. I found several guides online outlaying how to migrate to a new computer with your system living on the internal SSD and home folder on the external drive, most notably this article from MacWorld in December:
How to set up a Mac and macOS to take advantage of an SSD and external storage

I have followed the instructions and was easily able to migrate my system to the new machine but no matter what I do I cannot successfully migrate my Home folder. Instead I am greeted by the red no-access icon on the folders in my Home folder. I have checked the permissions and it says my user should have read/write access.

The process I am following is the same as the guide:
• Login with an account on the internal SSD
• Create an account with the same information as the one I am migrating
• Copy the user directory to the other drive
• Redirected User account to the new directory location

When I login to the new user account I want to migrate data to, all of the folders except Public show that I do not have access.

Thanks for any help!

 

[Fishrrman]

What you're trying to do is A BAD IDEA.

Your home folder should be on the same volume as your OS and applications -- unless you really REALLY know what you're doing.

That said, it's EASY to set up an external SSD to be "the boot drive".
I did this for SIX YEARS with my 2012 Mac Mini (just recently retired for a 2018).

But again, my external boot SSD (USB3) had the OS, apps, and accounts on it, "all on one drive".

A few questions:
- What is the capacity of your OLD, internal drive?
- What is the capacity of your NEW SSD?

Provide this information, and perhaps we can help you do it, THE RIGHT WAY this time...

 

[Isamilis]

I have tried what OP has asked. My iMac 2017 has very slow HDD. I used small external SSD as the boot volume. The SSD is only for booting / system data, while I want to keep user's data in the HDD (which has 1TB size).
I moved /Users folder to different volume (which is HDD) and create symbolic link point to that new folder location. It runs without problem, until I aware that iCloud sync (i.e. notes, iCloud drive) didn't work.
It just failed to sync, until I moved back to the boot volume. It seems, ~/Library must have located in the boot volume. Finally I kept /Users folder in the boot volume, but move some folders to external disk (Desktop, Documents, Downloads) to save space in my small SSD.