MacOS – Move Documents folder to different drive

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I would like to move the Documents folder to a different drive. I am running OS X 10.9.4. I am trying to preserve space on my OS SSD.

Best Answer

There are many web pages that will walk you through this process, here is a good one: http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/how_move_your_documents_folder

Basically you create a symbolic link to a folder on an external drive.

Here is information on how to use the console to create a symbolic link: http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2001110610290643

And here is my take on it:

Attach external drive
Copy your Documents folder from your Mac to the external drive
Rename the Documents folder on the Mac to Documents-old
Open Terminal
Type in cd /Users/Your User ID/
Then ln -s /Volumes/External Drive Name/Documents Documents
Test it out for a while to verify that it works, when you are happy with it you can delete the Documents-old folder from the Mac

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Art,

Do you have this working successfully?

Have you tried hiding the folders using something like:

chflags hidden ~/Documents

Then creating a link to it such as (in Terminal):

cd ~
mkdir stuff
cd stuff
ln -s ~/Documents

I believe that this will hide the ~/Documents folder from the Finder but it will still be there so anything writing to it will work OK. In addition you will see the link in ~/stuff...

Move Developer Folder

It might not hurt anything, or it might. A better (if more time-consuming) solution might be to delete your existing Developer folder, then re-install the dev tools to the drive you want them to be on. This will ensure that everything that has to be in /Developer is there.

Best Answer

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Move Developer Folder

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