How to move Documents/Movies/Etc using symlink

[docderwood]

Took me a while to figure this out, it appears to be working thus far. Here is my scenario:

2010 MBP with 500GB Hard drive mounted in Optibay, 240GB OWC SSD in hard drive bay.

Wanted to move Documents/Movies/Music/Downloads to the spinning disc 500GB while maintaining ALL other Home files on the SSD for speed.

What I did:

1) Backed up all the stuff I wanted to move
2) Deleted the Home folders using terminal on the SSD:

sudo rm -r /Users/"YourUserNameHere"/Music
sudo rm -r /Users/"YourUserNameHere"/Movies
sudo rm -r /Users/"YourUserNameHere"/Documents
sudo rm -r /Users/"YourUserNameHere"/Downloads

3) On the 500GB Spinning Disc, created folders named:
Music
Movies
Documents
Downloads

4) Using Symbolic linker program (Free, thanks to the creator): http://seiryu.home.comcast.net/~seiryu/

Created Symbolic Links to all of the above on the spinning disk

5) Copied these symbolic links to my home folder on the SSD, renamed them to
Music
Movies
Documents
Downloads

Word, Itunes, Iphoto etc now "Look" in my home folder on the SSD but Link "Save/Modify" to the spinning disc

Like I said, this seems to work, but I'm not an expert.

 

[jsilas]

Apologies for reviving an old thread, but I'm trying to do the same thing on my MBP, and I'm curious how the above has been working for you.

I, too, have an SSD and a platter drive in OptiBay, and I moved the whole Home folder to the platter drive. Unfortunately, this makes me reliant on the platter drive to an extent that I'm losing the benefits of the SSD in many cases.

I'd like to redo my setup, and am curious how your experience has been. Also, any users reading this who have set up Symlinks to a secondary drive, how'd you do it and what has been your experience?

Thanks!

 

[docderwood]

Apologies for reviving an old thread, but I'm trying to do the same thing on my MBP, and I'm curious how the above has been working for you.

I, too, have an SSD and a platter drive in OptiBay, and I moved the whole Home folder to the platter drive. Unfortunately, this makes me reliant on the platter drive to an extent that I'm losing the benefits of the SSD in many cases.

I'd like to redo my setup, and am curious how your experience has been. Also, any users reading this who have set up Symlinks to a secondary drive, how'd you do it and what has been your experience?

Thanks!

Thus far, it's worked flawlessly!

 

[jsilas]

Awesome - thanks for the quick response!

So with this setup, when you're using your machine to just browse the web or something, the platter drive doesn't spin, right? And it only spins up when a file thereon is accessed?

 

[docderwood]

Awesome - thanks for the quick response!

So with this setup, when you're using your machine to just browse the web or something, the platter drive doesn't spin, right? And it only spins up when a file thereon is accessed?

As far as I can tell, it still spins all the time, just isn't accessed much.

 

[jsilas]

As far as I can tell, it still spins all the time, just isn't accessed much.

Understood. I think there's a way to get the idle disk to spin down after a certain amount of time, but I'm not sure - I'll keep looking/reading.

In the meantime, I just rebuilt my MacBook from scratch with a fresh OS X installation, and implemented the Symlinks per your instructions. It works like a charm.

MANY thanks to you and to the Symlink app creator as you've made my life quite a measure simpler with your great app and simple instructions.

Cheers to you!

 

[rafaelgimenes]

its very complicated, for me I just used a simple command.
ln -s

sudo rm -r Pictures/Password:
ln -s /Volumes/DATA/Pictures/ Pictures
sudo rm -r Documents/

 

[CASLondon]

Took me a while to figure this out, it appears to be working thus far. Here is my scenario:

2010 MBP with 500GB Hard drive mounted in Optibay, 240GB OWC SSD in hard drive bay.

Wanted to move Documents/Movies/Music/Downloads to the spinning disc 500GB while maintaining ALL other Home files on the SSD for speed.

What I did:

1) Backed up all the stuff I wanted to move
2) Deleted the Home folders using terminal on the SSD:

sudo rm -r /Users/"YourUserNameHere"/Music
sudo rm -r /Users/"YourUserNameHere"/Movies
sudo rm -r /Users/"YourUserNameHere"/Documents
sudo rm -r /Users/"YourUserNameHere"/Downloads

3) On the 500GB Spinning Disc, created folders named:
Music
Movies
Documents
Downloads

4) Using Symbolic linker program (Free, thanks to the creator): http://seiryu.home.comcast.net/~seiryu/

Created Symbolic Links to all of the above on the spinning disk

5) Copied these symbolic links to my home folder on the SSD, renamed them to
Music
Movies
Documents
Downloads

Word, Itunes, Iphoto etc now "Look" in my home folder on the SSD but Link "Save/Modify" to the spinning disc

Like I said, this seems to work, but I'm not an expert.

I'm struggling here. When I do this, even when I log in as a root user, it appears to delete my original downloads folder, it appears that I've put a symlink to the moved/renamed "Downloads" that I've got on the HDD, but it seems that somewhere along the line OSX recreates the "special" downloads folder anew, next to my symlink. I'm now fairly confused, any advice?