Question about throwing applications on an external hard drive

[Merc248]

For now, I'm worried about a more specific case of putting World of Warcraft on an external USB hard drive, but I suppose this applies to everything else as well.

I want to offload WoW onto my external hard drive so it doesn't consume precious internal hard drive space on my Macbook. However, I'm worried about things getting screwy with the settings or whatever as soon as I use AppZapper on the internal hard drive copy of World of Warcraft and then try to launch WoW off of my external hard drive.

In any case, should I even be worried about this? Are most Mac applications self contained to the extent that I can be sure that there won't be any sort of orphaned links or whatever between the application and the system when I move the application somewhere else?

 

[Queso]

You can put a Mac application into any folder on any writeable mounted disk, as shown in the Installer program that some apps use. For most Mac applications, the icon you see in the Applications folder is actually a folder containing most of the program's needed files. However, the OSX GUI hides all this from you to save you from having to navigate a major folder structure. As long as you use the GUI to move the Application to the external drive, you shouldn't have any problems.

The only caveat to that is that I recommend you leave all of the OSX included apps (for instance, Address Book or Safari) in the default Applications directory to ensure that OSX updates don't screw things up for you down the road.

With World of Warcraft you shouldn't have any problem sticking it on an external drive. The only orphaned links I can think of will be the shortcut in the Dock, but that's easily fixed by dragging the orphaned shortcut off the Dock itself then dragging the icon from the new location into it's place.