Buy the Base Storage and do this! Move your Home folder to an external drive PART 2

In Part 2 of this video series I show you in 10 easy steps how to move your Mac internal home folder to and external SSD so you can free up the internal drives and not have to worry about running out of storage. You can buy Apple's base storage and put 90 percent of your data on an external drive!

ZikeDrive 20% off code: MSZ666
TEAMGROUP 2Terabyte NVMe (I am an Amazon affiliate)

iPowerresale Mac Studios

written guide on Apple Insider

0:00 Intro
1:00 Make sure to backup your data
1:19 Step 1 Turn off your icloud apps and log out of your Apple account
2:45 Step 2 Format your external SSD in APFS
4:34 Step 3 Copy your "home" folder to the external drive
5:18 Step 4 Copy internal Applications folder to the external drive
6:47 Step 5 Activate the external home folder
8:37 Step 6 Log into Apple account and turn on icloud apps
9:13 Step 7 Delete Apps from the internal Applications folder
10:02 Step 8 Internal drive cleaning
13:09 Step 9 How to get your external apps in launchpad with symbolic links
15:27 Step 10 Add a internal backup user account with administrative permissions
16:10 Home Folder Security
17:43 Outro

Discaimer, I am an amazon affiliate and by clicking on the link I get a small commisions.
This video is not sponsored I was not paid to make it. iPowerResale gave me a Mac Studio as a loaner to make a video on it which I will post soon. I earn 10 percent commission when you buy a zike drive with my discount code. Thanks for your support!

[MacSoundSolutions]

Important Mac OS 15.2 made it so you cannot just drag and drop your home folder to your external drive, there is a fix, new video coming soon.

[nowlinrl]

I have a M1 Mini with 256GB internal storage and have always had my home folder on an external drive, but one issue was that iCloud Drive wouldn't ever turn on. Thanks to your video, I saw that the external drive has to be APFS, so I formatted a new SSD as APFS, copied my home & applications folder over to it, and now iCloud Drive works!

One tip to consider -- I've always maintained a separate "administrator" user account like you mentioned, but rather than doing that as the last step, try doing it as the first step and do all your copying thru that account. By doing this, I didn't have to logout of my iCloud account, re-download my entire photo library, and so forth -- once I finished the copying, I used the admin account to change the home folder of my main user account to the new SSD, rebooted, logged in as my main user account, and everything worked perfectly the first time.

Great video, keep up the good work!

[tibimutasunta]

I prefer your advice rather than those advices from so-called tech reviewers.
💯👍👍👍

[oldscribe]

Brilliant, patient teacher! Golden. No yelling, no rants, just a quiet, gentle step by step guide to mastering something quite complex that has many moving parts. Now, if that little encryption challenge can be met in the same way, I'm doing this too.

[downieabz]

I’ve been searching and searching for instructions on how to do this, and none of the results has explained everything the way you have. In particular, I’d been trying to find out if moving the home folder to an external drive would work with iCloud Drive - you’re the only one to provide the answer (yes). A huge thank you from a happy new 256GB Mac mini owner.

[MrKumquat]

Thank you so much Lance! You inspired me to get the mini and external drives, and these videos have made it so that I can configure this setup to work. Most of my older stuff is now up and running, and now I just have to tackle the last few extra dregs of data left on the internal... So cool.

[rapidraga]

When someone knows what they are talking about, it shows! Thank you!

[spadesman_the_first]

Thanks for this video series. I was researching this very thing, and you are one of the first creators that I have seen who actually documented how to properly move your stuff to an external drive. I am almost ready to buy a mac mini, but would rather load up on RAM and not on SSD.

[bridevalley]

I really appreciate your knowledge and understanding of the Apple environment and how to customise it. Your explanation is exemplary and much appreciated.

[johnsammonds]

Probably the most useful video for a long long time

[weholmes]

Thanks so much! I finally moved my home folder to an external drive. I initially had trouble using the “ln -s “ to generate symlinks for Pages and Numbers, because I couldn’t delete the old links to allow new links, so I just moved the old links into a junk folder and the command worked! Fantastic 😅

[PasteboardReview]

just followed this tutorial and it was perfect! Micro Center was Selling the Base M4 Minis for $499!!!! had to pick one up! This was a great tutorial, thanks!!

[timswaysland]

Thanks Lance. Great video. Really helped me not pay the apple tax and to use an external ssd instead. Learnt a few things along the way too.

[PaulSchwartz-qm]

Hi Lance, All seems to be working well now that I followed your current directions. I noticed something that other viewers may have experienced. The previous failures to copy the user to the external drive, left files in the "Trash" section of the hard drive that did not show up in the Trash Bin. They were only accessable from the "Storage" info in System Setting, and took up a great deal of room on the internal drive. I was only able to delete them from the Storage screen. Very odd. Again, Thanks for the assistance.

[fiddleboy]

Very informative! Four thumbs up (I shared this with a friend)

[wildeman]

I’m presently (trying)transferring my iMac to the new mini M4 with external. So happy you are here to guide me! Can’t wait to watch your next videos. Thank you for making these, no one else is making videos on this issue

[gregmullins]

Great info! I appreciate the time you took to post this.

[toddbornholtz]

Thank you! Super helpful. New Mac user here. Bought the base Mac mini a few weeks ago preloaded with FCP and Logic Pro so I'm ready to move it to my new super fast external drive.

[BillWehnert]

I love this video, it was a huge help. One thing that I didn't hear you say is that to MOVE files from one drive to another, you need to hold down the COMMAND key while dragging your folder and that will move the files instead of copying them. I also had trouble with moving the applications, I ended up having to let it do a copy and then go remove each app individually to get things working OK. But overall, worked like a charm.

[TommyPanigale]

Any reason why you can't go with APFS Encrypted on the entire external to get around the security issue you mentioned?