Copying user back to boot drive

[ashleykaryl]

For the last year or so I've been using a 256gig SSD on a PCI card as the boot drive, but kept 600+ gigs of user files on a much larger internal SATA drive. This has worked well enough, however it's starting to cause difficulties with some apps, since OS X now blocks certain processes viewed as cross origin, even though it's on the same computer and clearly linked.

The solution it seems, would be to move my essential user data onto the SSD and have the system recognise that inside system preferences. In theory I could simply drag & drop my User's Library folder from the SATA over to the SSD and then choose that inside system preferences, followed by a restart. That's about 45 gigs of data.

Then it occurred to me that SuperDuper! might be a much safer bet, but I wondered if it could be configured to only copy the required data to the corresponding position on the SSD boot drive?

A lot of the files I have under my user could be stored on other drives, such as business accounts and work info etc. I also understand iMovie for example can happily access data from other drives, so all I really want is the essential user data needed to run the system on that SSD.

Thanks

Ashley

[dnanian]

We're not going to be able to isolate a folder and copy that as a folder to the other drive. You'd be better off, in this case, copying with Finder and using "Paste Exactly" to copy it to the SSD.

Or, maybe by using the advanced user preferences in system preferences you can clearly tell the system that your Home folder is on the other drive?

[ashleykaryl]

I have been using the system preferences already to indicate that the user folder is on another drive, but unfortunately changes in the OS are throwing up a few problems now, because certain elements are viewed as cross origin and therefore blocked when the user is on another drive.

I guess I'll give the finder option a go, but I've never seen an option for Paste Exactly. I've seen paste and match style, but only for text.

[ashleykaryl]

I've just found information about Paste Exactly. You learn something every day with Macs!

[dnanian]

We try to keep you on your toes, Ashley! :)

[ashleykaryl]

Just a quick follow up to say that worked perfectly using the paste exactly trick. The OS wouldn't let me copy/paste the actual Library folder, so the trick is not to select the user Library folder, but the inner contents. On a side note, you'll probably have make the user Library visible via the terminal.

After copying across all the Library contents you'll have to change the user startup under advanced options in the system preference user settings before restarting. Always make a backup first using SuperDuper!

To make this work I've had to leave a lot of the big things like the iMovie database and music library on the old SATA, but these can easily be accessed via symlinks. Overall this is a much better solution than I had previously.

[dnanian]

Glad to hear it! :-)