dragffy.com » Operating System http://dragffy.com/blog The development, documentation, and blogging domain of Gabriel Dragffy. Wed, 16 Nov 2011 11:17:43 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.2 Keeping user data seperate from system data on Apple OS X http://dragffy.com/blog/posts/keeping-user-data-seperate-from-system-data-on-apple-os-x http://dragffy.com/blog/posts/keeping-user-data-seperate-from-system-data-on-apple-os-x#comments Mon, 25 Feb 2008 12:54:13 +0000 Gabe http://dragffy.com/blog/posts/keeping-user-data-seperate-from-system-data-on-apple-os-x One of the things I grew to like about Linux was the /home directory. Any data for a user was always stored there. Furthermore, you could easily have that home directory on a different disc so when you deleted your system, you didn’t lose your user data too.

Under Windows I did the same thing by relocating ‘My Documents’ but it was never very succesful because remnants of your data always remained intermingled with the system. Having moved to OS X I found the default installation was to dump everything on one partition. OS X is a superior system and doesn’t suffer as badly , but you are still inconvenienced if you want to reformat and start afresh.

I did read several articles on the net about keeping your user data seperate, but all were complicated. I have developed a method that is very safe and easy to do. You will need to use the Terminal application to type several commands.

The easiest way to go about this is to wait until you are ready to reformat again. Make sure you BACKUP ALL YOUR DATA ON TO AN EXERNAL DRIVE. Restart with the installation disc. Once it starts up go to Utilities and choose Disk Utility. From the left pane select your internal hard drive in my case “74.5GB ST98823AS” and now you can choose the “Partition” tab. Under “volume scheme” choose a 2 partition layout. It will now show your disc split in two at about half way, drag the slider up/down so that you end up giving about 20GB to the top part. This is where your system and applications will be installed. Name the paritions if you so wish and apply changes. Then continue the installation as normal.

When you boot in to your new system start up the Terminal application. What follows next are some commands for you to type in to the terminal. These will be run as a super-user (hence sudo) and will require you to enter your password to execute properly. Ensure you get these commands correct as you will regret doing a rush-job here. Firstly, you should remember how you named your partitions, if you can’t remember then have a look in Finder. Or even better: type the following in the terminal:

ls /Volumes

I will refer to the paritions as “system” and “userpart”, replace these with the correct names of your partitions. Now, move your user folders off the system partition on to userpart:

sudo mv /Volumes/system/Users/ /Volumes/userpart/

Then move the old “Users” folder out of the way, and create a link back to it:

sudo mv /Users /Users.bk
sudo ln -s /Volumes/userpart/Users /Users

What you have done is to move the Users directory on to another partition and then create a softlink back to it. This means that all applications and OS X will still continue to use /Users on the system drive, but that just points to the user drive. The advantage is you don’t need to perform any special configuration to inform OS X or your applications of the change, they are unware of any change.

If you have any problems don’t blame me!

]]> http://dragffy.com/blog/posts/keeping-user-data-seperate-from-system-data-on-apple-os-x/feed 0 Mounting A Directory in Two or More Places without copying (for Linux) http://dragffy.com/blog/posts/mounting-a-directory-in-two-or-more-places-without-copying-for-linux http://dragffy.com/blog/posts/mounting-a-directory-in-two-or-more-places-without-copying-for-linux#comments Sat, 01 Sep 2007 16:03:45 +0000 Gabe http://dragffy.com/blog/posts/mounting-a-directory-in-two-or-more-places-without-copying-for-linux Have you ever wanted to show the contents of another user’s directory in a folder of your own? Or perhaps for whatever reason wanted to have the contents of a directory in two places at once, but without copying across? Well in Linux there is a way. Directories can be bound to other directories. The contents of one directory shows up in another, change one, and you change them both. Say for example you had the following directory /usr/home/fred but you wanted it to appear in Tom’s home directory also. First you need to create the destination folder that you will later bind the directory to:

mkdir /usr/home/tom/freds_folder

Now we use the mount command with the bind option to bind Fred’s folder in to the folder inside Tom’s home directory:

mount -o bind /usr/home/fred /usr/home/tom/freds_folder

Voilla! You now have the same folder in two locations. Just remember that the permissions will stay exactly the same.

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