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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...
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?
Instead of moving all your files off Dropbox, one option is to use GoodSync. Back before Dropbox lowered their prices per GB years ago, I used GoodSync with Amazon S3 to create my own media syncing cloud with multiple external hard drives on a handful of machines across three buildings. GoodSync can use Dropbox as a cloud storage provider and selectively sync any folders to any device you can connect to.
I don't work for GoodSync, but I feel like more people should know about them. Hopefully this is helpful to someone.
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?
Hi Michael S.197 ,
I just had a bit of a look at this issue at my end, and I might have some useful suggestions ... When logged in as my second Administrative level user, what you can do is as follows - or at least it works for me:
- Open a terminal window
- Navigate to the existing user's folder - normally this will be via: cd /users
- Your original user's folders will be in that location under the folder name used for your original user.
- Normally, you can change to that folder name, but can't access any of the folders below that. Navigate to that folder: cd {username}
- Now, what worked for me in terms of access, and being able to copy content from folders remaining under this was to change the ownership of the folders to the user I'm currently logged in under. To do this, use sudo the first time: sudo chown {second Admin user name} {folder name}
- You'll be prompted for the password of the secondary Admin user the first time, and then you can navigate to the folder whose ownership you've changed, and copy the contents ...
- However, I only tried this for a simple, single-level folder ... I didn't check if this worked for a deep folder with many levels, and whether changing the ownership of the top level fixes a deep folder structure ... I'll check that in a moment.
- I did check that you can change the folder ownership back when finished.
Hoping that might help ... as I said .. I'll try this approach with one of the more complex folders shortly.
