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HOME DIRECTORY in a diferent partition

felixelgato

felixelgato

macrumors member
Original poster
I have seen that is rare in the Mac community to define a secondary partition on disk to hold the HOME DIRECTORY leaving a partition for the operating system only. I would like to know your opinion on the matter of having a partition for the HOME DIRECTORY as in my case it brought many benefits to me like every time you need to try a new installation of Mac OS from scratch, you must format the partition, which involves obtaining a prior backup of the entire contents of the HOME DIRECTORY for later recall. This is not necessary if the HOME DIRECTORY has its own partition. So do the SETTINGS are also conserved. What do you think about it?, Do any of you use a separate partition for your Home Directory?😉
 
I did at one time, but now I only have my music and photos stored on another drive. When I had the setup you're suggesting, every once in a while, the System would lose track of my home directory, and create a new, unpopulated one on the boot drive. I would then have to boot from another account, delete the new version, rename the old version ("-1" would be added to the old one, as I recall), and then locate the old directory so the system would see it. It didn't happen often, and I can't exactly recall what caused it to occur, but it was enough of an annoyance that I just moved everything back onto the boot drive.
 
How often do you have to reinstall Mac OS X? In the end, you should have a backup anyway and it sure as hell shouldn't be on a partition....
 
yellow said:
How often do you have to reinstall Mac OS X? In the end, you should have a backup anyway and it sure as hell shouldn't be on a partition....
Click to expand...

Thank you all for your comments.

I agree that every time you install a new system must take a backup and I always do that. My point is that having the HOME DIRECTORY in an isolated partition system allows you to always format the drive and reinstall the operating system without having to recopy all the information back including all SETTINGS.
The way to tell the system the HOME DIRECTORY is in a separate volume is through SETTINGS> Users> Advance Options pointing the user ID by right-clicking, a menu is displayed which indicates the HOME DIRECTORY PATH.
 
I understand that..

I'm curious why you need to reinstall a new system often enough to warrant having to move your /User directory for convenience's sake?

And I think you mean System Preferences -> Accounts -> Right click on the user's Account icon -> Advanced Options...
 
Yes, Thank You. That is I wanted to say, I have spanish languaje in my MAC OS configuration and I didn't know how it is shown in english version.
I have heard that is better if you install a new operating system from scratch every time a new version is released, that's why I do it 2 times a year.
 
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