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Forum Discussion
MacOS 13.0 Ventura, and Dropbox follows OneDrive in forcing the folder on the system drive
With Monterey, OneDrive implemented the new apis from Apple for online syncing that demanded its main location be a specific folder on the system drive. 8 months later, the MacOS community section of...
I tried treeandrew's excellent idea of copying the user directory over to my partition drive (I keep my 2nd drive internal to the machine - and yes, SSD only! Hence major investment for a 4T drive to sync locally and in cloud). Thank you, such an intelligent solution.
However, Ventura prevented me from copying the Home folder - all kinds of files were not given permission. I used both Finder and Terminal. The syntax for Terminal was: cp -r <Home Directory> <Target Destination>
Finder error was simply:
Terminal gives much more information about the copy failures, which are sometimes "Permission Denied" or "No Such File or Directory" or "unable to copy extended attributes" &c &c. But mainly "Permission Denied". The majority of these were in the "Library" directory.
Were I back in my PC days, at this point I would have ripped out the SSD, stuck it in a USB hub, and copied using another system. However, with macs that breaks warranty, and I haven't got time.
So I called Mac service support. I spent 1.5 hours on the phone with them, and got ***Amazing*** service, really they are great. Two techs walked through all of my trials, thought through multiple scenarios, we tried different ways to copy the Home folder, and to no avail. He's raising it to engineers to see if they can't allow the Cloud Services folder to exist on another drive.
The idea that everyone is migrating to cloud-based only data is WRONG. Not because of my personal feefees, but look at the market. HDs on portable computers are now huge. You can get an 8T SSD in the latest macs. If we're carrying around that much data, it's so insecure, it's obvs we need it backed up on the cloud. But not exclusively--otherwise, why 8T drive, and Dropbox indexing just can't cope (sorry but it's true - maybe for your emails or letters or whatever, but not for a research library). Dropbox is good for backup, and great for sharing, but it ain't up to indexing.
Apple will be getting back to me - unfortunately, not before I set off on 2 wk lecture tour where I need data with me, but I'll workaround. I hope you at Dropbox are also pounding Apple with this problem! For your loyal customers who rely on you!
Hi Michael S.197,
Great news that Apple Support were helpful ... A little off topic, but I do remember the move of User Profile Home Directory quite a challenging process, but for my particular scenario worth doing, with a space constrained system drive, on a machine I really want to keep using for some time ...
I take your point about Apple's recent machines ... I've actually got a relatively recent MBP M1 Pro - with I'm afraid only 1 TB internal SSD - and also noted that the internal SSD options go to 8 TB now. The last time I looked, but perhaps that was a while ago they went to 4 TB, which would probably be sufficient for me.
Out of interest I put together a price for a 14" MBP, with the lowest-end M1 Max, 64 GB and 4 TB - I may as well upgrade the CPU if I were to changeover - and here is Australia - it comes in at $6,800. Not sure I can stretch to that just at the moment. The upgrade to 4 TB is $1,800 alone here in AU. So yes, I must admit having purchased "off the shelf" models mostly in the past, because you can often get them discounted, I suspect my next purchase will be a custom build with a much larger internal SSD to ensure I avoid all these space constraint issues.
Good luck with you Home Profile Move!
Cheers,
Trevor
treeandrew how did you get your home folder to copy over? Did you do it in Ace Detective, or an earlier OS?
Hi Michael S.197 ,
Did you see the link I put in the earlier part of this thread ... It's quite a good guide, even if it refers to an older version of the OS, however under Ventura some steps look somewhat different now ... However the basic steps should remain the same ... I should point out however that my move was actually done under Monterey - prior to upgrade under Ventura - but It wasn't causing any grief there either, so I think everything should work just fine. The key things I mentioned in my earlier post - that I think crossed over with your question about steps to take are still relevant:
- Perform the copy while logged on as a 2nd Administrative level user - and KEEP that user as insurance in case anything really gets broken with your primary user
- The setting up of the alternative settings for your User Profile Home Directory have changed location slightly in Ventura, but are pretty much the same as they were in earlier versions.
- I should also say that some software - not much, but some - very poorly doesn't honour the redirection. For example, it will still try to look for files / documents at the "original" location of your profile such as <<system drive>>/users/documents/... or <<system drive>>/users/library/... and even some Apple applications, such as Photos and Music will need to be directed to the "relocated" Photos Library and iTunes Media Library, but it all works fine.
- The side bar in finder is initially a bit clunky, but is easily repaired.
Hope that helps.
treeandrew
Hi, Ventura definitely doesn't allow copying those folders. And the tech and I looked over your advice about secondary admin level, and he said it wouldn't work from there either - same restrictions would apply.
However, I finally did find a workaround here, proposed by the brilliant Walter :
https://help.dropbox.com/installs/advanced-reinstallThank you so much Walter!!!!
One question, I was still not able to back up Documents, Downloads and Directory.Is there a sudo workaround for these?
