QuickTime – Store Temporary Recordings on Different Drive

quicktime

When you do a movie recording or screen recording, QuickTime stores the in-progress recordings in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX/Data/Library/Autosave Information.

On my machine, I have a fast SSD mounted on /Volumes/SSD but a slow platter drive on /. I'd like to send the autosave files to the SSD. With professional programs like Premiere, you can just set the scratch location, but with QuickTime it seems impossible. However, I really like QuickTime's screen recording feature and would like to use it with my fast SSD.

I tried to ln -s the Autosave directory to point at my SSD, but QuickTime errors out with an "unknown" error after that.

Best Answer

A much more robust way to do this is to store your entire user folder on the external drive. This avoids needing terminal and also avoids confusion with symbolic links and them breaking when software doesn't expect to see a link or a system upgrade script touches the Library folder contents.

You could make a second "recording" user to log out of the normal user and have all that user's files on the external drive.

To make a new user on an external drive named "Retina" and to name the user "external", follow these steps:

  • Open Users & Groups
  • Unlock the pane if needed
  • Click the + icon (lower left)
  • Make the new user (I called mine external)
  • Control click on the user name and choose Advanced Options...
  • Look closely at the Home Directory field - you will make a new folder on the external drive named the same "external" as the short name for your chosen user name
  • Click Choose...
  • Navigate to the external drive (Command-Shift-C shows the computer). I use the Command-Shift-N shortcut to make a new folder called Users, then make a second new folder inside the /Volumes/Retina/Users folder named external - the same case as the user's short name.

Then you can use the Apple menu to log out of your current user (or enable fast user switching) to change between the user that has all temp files and recordings to the external drive by logging on to the "external" user account.

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