Help setting up Mac

[scouser75]

Hi Guys,

The time has come for me to finally sort out and properly set-up my Mac.

I'm using a Mac Pro with Snow Leopard. I have 3 internal HD's. One I use as my Boot drive, so only holds software.

The other I use as my Media drive, which holds all my documents and my wifes.

The third is solely my other media drive, which holds all my video work.

What I want to do is this:

When I log in with my account I want to access ONLY my documents. I don't want to access any of my wifes stuff. And when she logs in I don't want her to have access to any of my stuff... including my third media drive.

I know this was possible if I only had the one internal drive. But due to all our documents being on the second internal drive it means everyone has access to everything.

Finally, I also have a Guest account. Now, when this is accessed there are no HD's visible on the desk top for prying eyes. BUT if someone was to go into finder they can have access to EVERY document and file on the computer. Kind of defeats the purpose of the Guest account, hey!

Any help is much appreciated

 

[Makosuke]

All you need to do is make sure that "Ignore ownership on this volume" is NOT checked for your secondary data drives (in the Get Info window in the Finder), and then set the permissions on the folders such that only the appropriate user has read/write permissions and everyone else has none. It will then work exactly as you describe.

Note that, in a quick test, when you use the Finder Get Info window to remove your own permissions to a file and you're an administrator, it apparently leaves some residual ACL permissions, so the better way to do this would be via the terminal.

It's very easy to find how-to tutorials, but in short "sudo chmod -RN 700 [shortname of new owner] [path of directory]" followed, just in case, by "sudo chmod -RN [path of directory]".

If you're not familiar with the terminal, dragging a file or folder onto the Terminal window will automatically insert its path to save typing. The first command sets the appropriate owner for the directory and all it's contents, and removes write permission from group and user, so it's ONLY that user; the second command removes any ACLs that might exist, to make sure that nobody else has permissions.

A user with admin privileges can, of course, override these settings, but that's going to be true in any situation using UNIX permissions; the only workaround is an encrypted disk image.

 

[scouser75]

Thanks for your answer.

All that seems a little too complicated for me

I believe I can just move my Home Folder to another drive, which is what I may end up doing