Important Update!!!!!!!!!!!!! Mac OS 15.2 made it so you cannot drag and drop your home folder to your external drive, there is a fix, new video coming soon.
This tutorial is GOLDEN. I have watched dozens of other videos explaining basically the same thing but with a lot of technical background that I feel are not necessary. I trust Lance as a savvy user, as I feel I am, but I am not as technically proficient as a lot of guys out there. I just need to set things up quickly and efficiently without paying Apple more than necessary. Thanks Lance.
I picked up a used mac for my 15yo daughter to use garageband. I cant tell you how helpful your videos are to someone who has been using Windows for 20+ years. I have learned alot from your videos and I am now building a hackintosh for myself without messing up her mac. I appreciate the info!
At 12:50 you illustrate how one user can’t see into another’s home folders, as expected. Can you test whether these privileges hold for the home folders you copied to the external? If you have multiple people using your computer you would want this privacy feature to be in place on all their external folders.
Another convert and believer! I've been a convert from Windows since the late 1990s, when Windows was version 3.1 and built on DOS. There was a virtual genius at my post office where I worked who took me under his wing and introduced me to Macintosh. My life changed forever. Welcome aboard, and enjoy the ride.
Picked base model this week. Bestbuy Black Friday sale have good deals on external SSD this week. Picked up Crucial X10 2 TB SSD for 150$. Read up to 2k MB but whatever. Fast enough for what I used it for. I followed Lance's tips. When installing, I dragged the installer icon to the Application folder on external drive. Show up in Launchpad automatically. Loved the size. I can take it with me when I'm traveling. Plugged to hotel's room tv.
Awesome video! If anyone is experiencing their Mac mini m4 crashing and restarting after connecting an external drive, here's something that might help. Sometimes, simply preventing disk sleep from the settings menu isn’t enough to stop it from sleeping and I suspect this could be the issue I was having, and what worked for me was entering the following commands in Terminal: sudo pmset -a disksleep 0 sudo pmset -a sleep 0 After applying these, my Mac mini hasn’t crashed so far (still testing, but fingers crossed!). Hope this helps someone out there!
It happened again, not long ago after my "fix." I've tried a myriad of different things that so far till now seem to hopefully have worked again. Here are a couple to mention: 1. Prevented the external nvme enclosure drive from being indexed by spotlight. 2. Increased the time it takes for the display to turn off after a screen saver becomes active to 5 minutes or 10 minutes. The second suggestion with the display setting came from a forum post where someone was having seemingly the exact same issue as I did and someone else suggested it was a display or GPU issue (even though they didn't mention an external drive being an issue). When my mac would recover from the crash/restart, I would take the error log and ask ChatGPT about it, and it responds, claiming it's a kernel panic related to the display or GPU (Currently using HDMI + 4k high refresh rate monitor).
@@Sarsour_ so what is the issue, I can sleep two external drives and no crashes. But you can just set the settings for drives to not sleep when the display sleeps if you want.
@MacSoundSolutions It seems like the issue has been resolved so far after my last update mentioned about increasing the screen's time to switch off after a screen saver to 5 minutes, which is what I set it at. That was also a solution I read off an apple forum thread, as I mentioned. The sleep prevention settings from the settings menu and the terminal command weren't enough to solve it for my case in particular, so hopefully this helps anybody who might ever come across the issue, though I should probably document these suggestions in a forum post.
SOME IMPORTANT NOTES: the external applications folder was not visable at 9:46 in the video when it should have been. It needs to live outside the user folder not in it, it was an edit mistake not to show inside the home folder at that point and FYI the 512 SSD option is twice as fast on the write speeds but not the read speeds. The 512 is 4000MBs write - the 256 is 2000MBs write , both are 3000MB read. Also Apps like Pro Tools get installed to All Users and the apps don't take up that much space so don't try and move apps for all users into the external applications folder, I would test apps on a one by one bases when moved externally. You can install their sound libraries samples etc on to the external drive and point the apps to them.
And the speed difference only translates to marginal performance gains in all but a very few cases anyway. Unless you're moving 50GB files around all the time, you're not even going to notice the difference. It's all very fast once you get to 2000 MB/s. I tested the boot time of an 8GB Windows 11 virtual machine using VMware on the internal SSD and an external SSD with a top speed of 1000MB/s, and the latter was only one second slower -- 10 seconds vs 9 seconds.
@@MacSoundSolutions I had read about that but opted to step up the unified memory a notch instead. I’ve been working with a 2018 MBP 15” with 1TB drive and loads of memory but it struggles with photoshop and Topaz AI tasks. My wife’s 2022 MacBook Air 15” M2 standard build 512 MB mops floor with it performance wise. Excited to put my new mini to work. My first computer was an EPSON with an 8088 cpu. It cost around CDN$2200 in 1986, 30 MB hard drive and two floppy disks, monochrome monitor
Does this work with a 4TB Xternal drive as well or is it limited to 2TB? And can you transfer/migrate everything from your M2 to the new M4 with xternal drive you've setup so you don't have to reinstall everything again?...Sorry for all the questions TY so much for al the NF0!!
Also DOes it effect the speed for Audio recording from DAW's using the xternal drive or does the Mini think that the xternal is an internal and works as if it is an internal? FYI I'm Using UAD Apollo x6's.....TY for the vids
Ive never seen a more concise and to the point video, truly a masterpiece of a tutorial! Especially since its basic use case and not weird one off test/use case. Really appreciate the work you put into this!
Lance, you can get your external drive’s apps to automatically appear in the Launchpad by placing a symlink of the external drive’s Applications folder in your user folder.
I do the same with mail, have a lot of mailboxes, have the main mail library folder symlinked to the external drive. And photo library placed to external too.
This didn't work for me. I tried it just a few minutes ago. I created an alias to Applications folder on my external drive, moved the alias to my home folder (also on the external drive), and then renamed the alias to "Applications"
That's the first actually helpful video on how to use your external storage in the most optimal way. I had to mess with sym-links a lot to make something work and if you know anything about MacOS this can get sloppy fast. This information is a lifesaver!
This video was EXTREMELY helpful, thank you! I'm purchasing an M4 mini base with an extra 8 GBs of RAM around the first week of March (tax refund), but I'm purchasing parts for a Thunderbolt 4 dock and at least 4TBs M.2 SSD storage now so I'll be ready. I've used Macs on and off since 2009 for podcasting and videos, but not since Mavericks on a 2014 27-inch Intel Haswell iMac. I forgot that Apple hides the user folder, and it was very helpful to know which application files are transferable to the external drive. I've saved this video for March when I purchase my M4 mini. I plan to go back to content creation, and iMovie has always been my go-to, Audacity (now Tenacity) for sequencing, eight-to-ten Firefox tabs open for research and a couple of other items before I posted a show on iTunes and a website (haven't done this several years, but I'm willing to try it again). Thanks again for the video.
Got mine yesterday. Moved mail to external with symlink to original folder, photo library external, steam library external and whiskey bottles external. Easy enough. App Store is also configured to put >1 GB apps to external.
This tutorial is amazing! It's exactly what I needed. I wanted to use a Mac mini as my DAW, but some of the digital audio stuff wanted to install on the system drive and only the system drive. I ended up running out of room and had nothing but problems. After using this tutorial, it looks like smooth sailing now. Thanks!
Great video. It helped me understand the Mac file system. I had my documents and desktop folders on my iCloud and wanted it on my Mac. This helped me so much 🙏🙏
@MacSoundSolutions Fantastic videos Lance! And thanks to ALL who have been contributing info to Lance! These videos are really sharing something important and needed. So happy to see all the updates on processes Lance. THANK YOU ROCK --AND-- COMPUTER STAR!!!!! 🤩🤩🤩
A million thanks, my friend, for your time and effort. Your ideas and tips are extraordinary-you’ve saved us from a lot of head-scratching and headaches.
Great video, simple, concise but thorough, thank you! I've been using a Mac for decades but with how often Apple changes things around have completely lost touch on how to do this.
AWESOME; I knew there had to be a way to do this, Thank You!!! I purchased a mini several years ago with a 512GB drive and suffered great pains trying to keep enough free space (Pics, videos, Logic Pro plugins and loops, etc.). Apple has done things to prevent upgrading physical components such as soldering the memory and/or storage. I've been contemplating upgrading to an M4 or going back to a PC.
Hey Lance. I followed your guide and have some other insight to offer based on my experience thus far. I use encrypted APFS. This is a little tricky because MacOS no longer prompts for an APFS password at boot up on Apple Silicon Macs. It needs to be pre-mounted. The way I was able to work around that limitation was to use the secondary admin user I created to login first, mount the external drive with my home directory on it under that user, and then lock the screen and login as me from the lock screen. The other thing I did was to hookup a 43" LG 4K UHD TV as the display and set the resolution down from the native 3840x2160 to 2560x1440 - and it looks STUNNING with retina-like smoothness. Not bad for a TV I paid $189 for. I hope some find this helpful. Cheers!
@@6StringPassion. you are spot on I did same today, if you set the internal user to auto login with the encrypted drive in its keychain you only have to type the password once to login the external user and bingo.
@@MacSoundSolutionshi lance, I’m awfully sorry for the silly question (I am far from adept)… I also set my external as encrypted and now cannot log in. I know it’s a pain but could you walk me through how to solve this as I now cannot log in with or without my external disk plugged in?
@@TheItalianNomad new video on this posted today or tomorrow. Basically you need to have the internal backup user administrator account. Log into that on boot, the encrypted drive will ask for its password, click save in keychain, them you can switch users even log out of the internal at this point, but when ever you boot up you have to log into the internal user first and the encrypted drive will mount because its now in the keychain of the internal user and then just switch to the external user, it's a little bit of a pain but if you don't shut down often then its not a major big issue.
Excellent work, thank you very much for taking the time to delve into this, Very cool! BTW, B&H Photo has the Mini in stock and is asking $560, and if you have their payboo credit card you save the tax, so you pay $20 more but they ship now instead of a couple of weeks later...
Thank you for this! Today I am ordering my Mac Mini M4. Based on your two videos, I have bought a 2TB Samsung Thunderbolt 4 and enclosure and will be following your 10 step transfer process. Extremely helpful and oh so timely! Many thanks, like and a sub for you today.
Hello. I recently a Mac Mini M4 (my first Mac, long time Win user). I got the base model, and after seing you video I got an external drive. I reset the Mini to factory (it was already on 15.2), and went through your guide. After setting up the folder, activating the Home Folder and upon the first restart, I can't login again: I get Unable to Log.... "Logging into the account failed because an error occurred." I got a backup admin account before to avoid getting into trouble. The only difference is that I kept the external drive as exFat (thought about keeping it readable on PC as well). Using the backup admin I changed to APFS, and now it works. It may be obvious anyone Mac savvy, I just dropped here as it might save someones pain. Very important to have the second admin user to recover from such errors. Thanks for your guide.
Yes must have the backup user and must format in APFS I believe I say that in all the videos? Sorry for the hassle. I will be posting a new video soon. That’s got some more tips as I keep learning stuff after using it this way for a month.
@ yes you mentioned the AFS. My fault, not yours. I didn’t understand that as a “must”, and when things went wrong, that’s was my prime suspect. Again, thanks for the videos and tips, it really helped me setup my first ever Mac. In addition to the drive itself, I benefited from several small tips: seeing how you accessed certain options (folder options, visualization etc) and performed certain tasks, the drag and drop of installed software etc… all helped me get around. Now I’m exploring and learning how to use the OS and perform tasks.
Does Apple Intelligence still work? I know if you put the operating system completely on an external drive. It will not. Will it work with just the home folder moved?
Yeah that’s true, the 256 is still a lot slower than the 512 but still fast enough. I bumped it up to 512GB because after all some data will always be written on it so for longevity it will probably make a difference
@jooplin I've seen people do speed tests showing 256 is the same speed is 512 for this generation. I thought it was just M2 that they took away the RAID for the 256 model?!
@@aerobrain2001 hmm maybe I need to check again, but I saw one guy using the BlackMagic Disk test and it was roughly half the speed of the 512GB with the M4 Mac Mini, it has two chips now but that could just be because the 256GB was really full maybe?
@@aerobrain2001 I am just thinking to myself, if you really try this approach with the home folder, than 250Gb maybe will last an easy 10 years. If I assume it's a premium quality SSD it could last about 150TBW, I think that's a very generous estimation. Could be trouble if you have consistently high workloads and will more often swap memory than maybe you could run into trouble in the future, also a faster SSD will make the memory swaps less noticable. Also the fresh new OS will get cluttered and you'll never know if the storage requirements for newer OS versions will get higher I personally would always second guess my 256GB choice if I had hiccups or any kind of trouble, so I went for the safe bet with 512GB. The memory upgrades aren't that steep if you order somewhere else than Apple. I got mine with 16GB and 512GB now for 763€, would have cost me 929€ in the Apple Store. Thanks for listening to my TED Talk
I would also like to mention the new Mac Mini also has upgradeable storage with 2 slots in each one. Now both drives are diffrent and also they need to come out of another Mac Mini and you also need a DFU Restore from another Mac to make it work :)
Oh man! This is great stuff! This is exactly what I was looking for. I have yet to buy the Mac mini as I am still struggling with which configuration to choose. That could save me quite a bit of money. Just subscribed.
Oh wow so the iCloud library folder copy also went to the external. That’s amazing since I found out that it’s the cause of that hidden system data space more than cache.
A helpful tip: order the Zike drive enclosure allowing plenty of time; it ships from Hong Kong and takes awhile, depending on where you live. I have my Mini and NVMe all ready to go, but still waiting for Zike .... yike!
@@MacSoundSolutions Update. Zike drive enclosure arrived today (Vancouver, Washington). It took a total of 13 days from the order date, which I don't think is too bad for all the way from Honk Honk. For folks ordering one, I'd allow two weeks delivery time in the U.S. to be on the safe side. The enclosure looks fantastic and is well made.
For folks getting an error when copying their home folder. Log into an internal user admin then create a new user admin, this is the one you will be copying to the external drive, don’t log into it, copy the new user to the external drive, it will ask for your current logged in users password, once copied activate the new path of the new user. Reboot and log into the external user. The issue is you can’t copy the user when logged into it you need to do it with a different admin user account.
Your videos are so informative and helpful, and they are really fun to watch! Great voice, if I may add. I am one of those that have ecountered an error when copying the home folder to the external drive. Certain files in the Library folder can't be copied. After some digging, I discovered that a folder called "group.com.apple.CoreSpeech" in the "Group Containers" folder cannot be copied. (this was causing the issue) I want to try the method you have mentioned here, but what do you mean by "activate the new path of the new user"?
@good info, to activate it’s just selecting the new home folder path, for the external home folder. I show it in the video. Once you copy the user folder to the external you have to set the new user location / path.
@@MacSoundSolutions Thanks, clear! Quick question, how come were you able to copy the Home folder to the external drive for the user account that you were logged in with? It didn't cause issues?
@ maybe the latest OS updates changed something. I got errors when I tried to copy recently, 15.2 changed some things. I will be putting an updated video in the next couple of days. But copied no problem when I was logged into my backup internal account when copying the account I wanted on the external drive.
@@MacSoundSolutions Awesome, and everything worked for me as well! Successfully copied the entire home folder to the external drive! Thanks for the amazing tutorials! Can't wait for the next release!
I ordered mac mini 4 with 24 Ram & 512GB….. I will just use the external ssd for the apps,since apple already make the option for installing large apps on SSD…. Thanks a lot for
Nice and the 512 does get faster right speeds on the SSD and the 256. I originally thought they were the same but the 512 gets double the right speeds in the same speeds as the 256
Getting a mac mini in a couple of weeks, and very much looking forward to setting it up supported by your excellent videos on the subject. Much appreciated my man 🤗
Thanks for the great video, I am definitely going to do exactly the same. Question is, what would happen if the external drive goes bad? What are the options to keep the data safe other than time machine backups?
Think i will put two accounts on mine. a small local admin one i use rarely. and a large external one for my main account. so i can always get it if the external isn’t available
Hello, me again, nice to see that you are taking all the risks we do not want to take I haven't bought my Apple mini yet, I downloaded your video and take notes on every thing you do. You are a fast thinker, I am not. Many thanks for all the info.
switched 20yrs ago an never went back even though use windows suite 90% of time. microsoft just runs infinitely better with no issues on apple hardware with opencore. 2009 mbp causes zero issues compared to brand new multi thousand pc
@@RichieKeane Funny, there was a guy on another comment thread that said he needed to run a Windows 11 virtual machine on his macOS system because the macOS version of MS Office had issues with the stuff he was doing...
I bought an M4 Mac mini with 512 GB of storage on it, and I love his idea. I just bought a 1 TB SSD drive to do this process. My question is one of order. I want to migrate stuff from my current iMac onto the new machine. Should I do the process described in this video first and THEN do the migrating step, or should I migrate everything to the new machine and then do this process. Note that the iMac also has a 512 GB drive and is not full yet. Thanks!
Make a Time Machine backup, you can then set up your new Mac MINI, but don’t log into your Apple account yet creat an internal administrative user account and give it a different name than your old user account that you’re going to copy over to your external drive and this internal user account will be your back up internal administrative account. connect your new Drive format in APFS and connect your Time Machine back up drive and copy your user home folder over to the back up drive. Then create a folder on your new drive called Users then you can copy your home folder/user from your Time Machine back up into the users folder on the external drive. So new drive name/ users/ user home folder. Then create the same name user account by adding a new user in system settings and then activate the external user account and reboot. Now you’ll be running off the external user account and you can now log into your Apple account. Because copying all your data to the internal drive can get messy because then you’re gonna have to remove it all then your last step is to migrate your data from your Time Machine back up, but only the data not the user account that you already copied to the external drive otherwise you’re gonna have the internal hard drive get all full Makes sense. Watch my latest video on Time Machine backups that pretty much has all the info in there again, one of the most important things is to not log into your Apple account when your first setting up the Mac and Apple will try to get you to do that. Don’t do it until you have the external user workingthen login to your Apple account. Good luck.
These video's have been great! I have the m4 256gb. The home folders are now running off the the external drive. Of which runs faster than the internal. Thank you for making great videos on this. Very simple to follow! 👍
Amazon is back-ordered until after Christmas. Also, Costco has even better prices but they are all out of stock until December, or later. Seems the Minis is flying off the shelves.
I’m glad I ordered a week after launch (saw reviews etc) and already have mine. Great piece of hardware, shame on Apple to include 256 GB SSDs in 2024… (or they could just ask 50€ for the upgrade, that is what costs a full drive with controller, so the extra 256 GB without a controller for Apple must cost 10€ or so (at most…)
Wow, lots of good stuff in there. Lots of areas covered that I have touched in the past, but a few gems in there that I didn't know about. I'll definitely review this video again if/when I get my next mac mini or studio or imac (probably in a year or two). Thanks for doing this and for all the good information/tricks/hints.
I’m curious if you move the home folder onto an external drive, if the external drive dies on you, and you get a new drive then give it the same name, will the Time Machine backup recognise the new drive as the right location to restore your data to?
I believe it will, I’m going to check out Time Machine and do a video on it very soon, but I already know you can back up the external drive combined with the internal and I believe you could just copy the home folder on Time Machine to the new drive and then activate it
Great video 👏 I can’t believe I haven’t come across your channel before. As a long time Mac user (since the late 1990’s), and a long-time IT professional, I can appreciate the work you’ve put into creating very useful videos like this! I’m just trying to decide what to do with my 12+ year old Mac Mini since I upgraded to the M1 Mac Mini a few years ago, since these Mac products just keep going and going like the energizer bunny 😂
I asked ChatGPT ;) It would affect my choice for 256 vs 512GB version. Maybe someone can corroborate this but it seems correct to me: Which drive is used for swap memory when you use the Mac mini m4 with the home folder and all non Apple apps moved to an external nvme 40GB drive? Is it the internal drive or the external drive? I’m asking because if it’s the external drive I won’t need to buy the 512GB version but am set with the 256GB version. I can then use that cash to get more RAM instead, like 24GB instead of the base version’s 16GB. Answer: When using a Mac Mini M4 with the home folder and non-Apple apps moved to an external NVMe SSD, the decision of where macOS uses swap memory depends on how the system handles the external and internal drives. How macOS Handles Swap Memory 1. Swap Memory Basics: • macOS uses the internal SSD by default for swap memory because it’s tightly integrated into the Apple Silicon architecture. • Swap memory is critical for system performance when your RAM is fully utilized. Apple optimizes the internal SSD for this task because of its high speed and reliability. 2. Moving the Home Folder to an External Drive: • While your home folder and application data are stored on the external drive, macOS still uses the internal SSD for swap memory. • External NVMe drives are not used for swap memory, even if the external drive is fast and has ample free space. macOS prioritizes the internal SSD for this task because of its secure and low-latency connection to the system. 3. Why the Internal SSD Is Critical for Swap: • The internal SSD is integrated into the system for macOS operations, including virtual memory and swap. • Thunderbolt connections, while fast, have higher latency compared to the direct connection of the internal SSD. Recommendation Based on Setup • 256GB Internal SSD with 24GB RAM: • If you increase the RAM to 24GB, macOS will use less swap memory overall, making the 256GB internal SSD sufficient for system tasks. • Your external NVMe can handle the majority of storage needs, including the home folder and applications. • 512GB Internal SSD with 16GB RAM: • If you stay with 16GB RAM, the internal SSD will need to handle more swap activity, and the 512GB version will provide better durability (more NAND chips) and faster speeds for intensive tasks. Verdict • If swap memory stays on the internal SSD (which it does), upgrading to 24GB RAM will reduce swap usage, making the 256GB SSD + external NVMe a practical setup. • If you often run memory-intensive tasks (e.g., video editing, large simulations), the extra RAM will benefit you more than the additional internal SSD space. Summary: Investing in 24GB RAM with the 256GB SSD + external NVMe is a better option if your workflow involves heavy multitasking but doesn’t require excessive internal storage.
macOS always uses the swap memory file on the boot drive. So, in this example, the swap memory will be written to the internal SSD since that's still the boot drive.
@@MutantWorm This is why you should never depend on ChatGPT. It's mostly accurate, but the gains are marginal at best. Assuming you keep your 256GB drive under 60% full, that's more than enough to maximize the SSD's performance and durability. The speed difference for the swapper's activity is not even going to be noticeable between 256GB and 512GB. The extra bandwidth of the larger drive is only useful for copying very large amounts of data (e.g. 50GB or more on a regular basis) which is what your fast TB4 external drive is for. You only need more memory if the memory pressure goes into the red and maybe the yellow. If it stays in the green, then upgrading the RAM or the SSD will do next to nothing for you in terms of performance. A fast Thunderbolt 4 SSD solution is by far the cheaper option and you won't notice any slowdown. I tested the boot time of my 8GB Windows 11 VM on the internal drive and a "slow" (1000MB/s) external SSD. The internal took 9 seconds, the "slow" external took 10 seconds. If I had used a fast PCIe Gen 4 drive instead, there would have been no difference. And unless you're a very heavy user, there is no way you're going to wear out your internal SSD in less than 10 years, and probably not even 15 years, especially if you're using an external drive for your home folder.
My new kit includes a Mac Mini M4, with 24 Gb of RAM, a small hard drive, and a Samsung 995 Pro 2TB SSD, in an Acasis container. I have watched your videos on the use of an external SSD, and have gone 'nuclear'. Using the 'Apple Support' instructions, I now have all my o/s on my external SSD, and my internal 256 Drive is 'empty'. My transfer speeds are c. 2800mb/s. Everything works, it's per Apple instructions: sorted.
Thanks for your videos. I did add an external 1TB SSD to my M4 Mini, and migrated my home folder to it and activated it, however, I cannot copy ANY applications from my internal drive to my new external drive. I tried downloading a new app from the Mac App Store and it loaded onto the internal hard disk, without giving me any options to install it on the new external drive. I also cannot delete non-systems apps from the Applications folder on the internal drive, despite it not being locked and that it has Read/Write permissions for "Everyone". This smells like a permissions problem but I cannot see what it is
You need to be logged into the external account and then just drag and drop the applications folder from the internal drive to the external drive and if that doesn’t work, log back into your internal backup user and do the same thing. Don’t copy the individual applications copy the whole folder
@ I’ll leave it to the Mac experts to answer what we could be doing to cause the issue, I was happy to learn all you need to do is log in to he backup account to delete them from the system hard drive.
@@mattmc190 you need to log into an internal administrator account to delete the internal apps. If you didn’t make one you can easily add it now then delete the apps.
Another approach to moving the home folder on new machines is to make the first account you create the “Backup Account” and when creating a new admin account on “Users & Groups” you also change the home folder so the first login on that account will already be in the external folder.
Yes, you can but of course you want to have that back up user because if your drive is not attached and you go to login to the external home account, you will have issues so you need a back up internal administrative user so you can log into your Mac when the external drive is not connected
@MacSoundSolutions so if the internal drive user account is present and the external drive is disconnected will it automatically switch back to using the internal one?
Why move anything?. Why not set up the internal admin account first? When logged into this, setup your main user account and then change the home folder location before even logging into it. Then when you log in to your proper account for the first time, everything is created on the external drive from the very start. No need to move anything. I assume this will work, I don’t see why not.
@ I want to try this, but I set mine up to boot entirely off the external drive. I want to change it so it uses the internal drive with the user folder on the external, but I’d want to clone the external drive first in case I want to go back, and I don’t have a drive big enough (my external is 4TB).
It also seems counterproductive to move applications to an external drive when the internal is much faster. You’d need a LOT of apps to fill the 256GB internal drive. Having user data on the external is fine though. I though this video would be about a hardware mod, not just plugging another drive in 😁
@@Stabby666 the external is faster than the base internal 256GB. Plus, running the OS on an external drive means Apple Intelligence and Apple Pay don’t work (which I didn’t know when setting up). I’m actually doing a Time Machine backup now and will try my method and report back. Oh - also, I noticed my idle power consumption was a little higher than others were reporting, which I assume is due to the OS being on an external drive. Hopefully with the OS on the internal drive, idle power use will be reduced.
@ if an external drive is faster than the internal then that’s a terrible design I think. The PCI-E bus should be the fastest way to transfer data so maybe it’s cheaper controller chips or something.
If you live within a 2 hr drive of a Microcenter, these have been $499 for over a week. Atlanta stores restocked 27+ units today, spread across 2 stores. Again $499 for over a week now. If using MICROCENTER’s credit card, $475 before tax.
Beware: Finder Tags appear to be broken with iCloud with a user folder on an external drive. I’m setting up a new mini. Everything is normal, except Finder tags are for local files only. They will not sync to iCloud.
@ Would be great if someone knows the fix. But I’d figured out the external user folder with iCloud sync 10 days ago (before these videos came out). But I realized last night that Tags syncing is broken. It seems to fail with the move to an external folder. I’ve now made a created a user folder several times with slightly different approaches. And they all break Finder Tags with iCloud. Maybe it’s just something weird with my iCloud account. But I can’t make it work.
Honestly this is like going back 20 years having to mess around like this. Apple should be ashamed. Just put a decent amount of storage in at a decent price and more people will buy them.
If you've been an Apple user for 20 years, you're used to it! I once had to help someone out whose macBook had run out of storage -- he had a 128GB internal SSD.
Nicely done. A very helpful properly detailed demo that can be super useful to so many to save money. For older minis and the Mac Studio maybe the Satechi hub is a good option to give you a base hub with USB-A ports and SD/microSD card slots with home drive in it. I'm sure there will something similar for the M4 mini form factor soon too.
i used ur set up on my new base mac mini - external ssd 2tb : after logging in to icloud , if any one has issues with server apps after ie app store , apple tv etc... just log out icloud and re log in in resolves it , thx for ur easy set up
Yes copy the whole applications folder don’t open it and drag the apps over. So you don’t need to creat an app folder just copy the whole app folder from the internal to the external.
It was a very nice video. Thank you!!! However, when copying user folders from the internal disc to an external disc, the library folder was not copied at all. The pop-up window says that it cannot be copied. Couldn't I copy it because my mac OS version is 15.2?
you have to log out of your apple account and icloud apps before copying, other wise make a time machine backup and copy it from the TM backup as it is not tethered to the cloud or apple account.
@@mtbmonk7076 @ turn off all iCloud apps under iCloud and Siri then log out Apple account and reboot. Log into an internal user admin account and copy the home folder. If this still doesn’t work make a Time Machine backup and copy the home folder from the TM backup but it should.
Thanks so much! Great tutorial. I have a follow-up question. How do you get Apps from outside the app store to install on the Application folder on the external drive. Those drag and drop installations are easy-enough to circumvent, however the Spotify installer (e.g.) uses the internal Application folder. Do I have to copy and delete like you did in the beginning with Garage Band, Key Note, etc. or is there a smoother solution?
@@SandroCannova apps over 1 gig can install on the external drive if downloaded from the App Store. Watch at the end of my latest video I show the best way to setup the applications folder on the external drive, some apps must live on the internal as they are only installed for all users, small apps that are sing user still need to be copied and then deleted.
So I saw this video a month or so ago and was convinced to buy myself a nice Christmas gift 🤣 I finally got around to going thru this with many pauses, rewinds, a few mistakes, but was able to get the mini setup after a few hours of “fun” before work this morning. I had a spare 4TB SSD external drive laying around and used that. I haven’t been brave enough to delete the original home folder since I didn’t want to create a brick right before walking out the door 😂 Anyway, this USB external seems to power off with the computer (duh) and so when the computer boots back up, it won’t see the external or let me log into the main acct. It took me a bit to figure out that it was because it powered off. So I just went over to the drive and unplugged/replugged and it was awake, and no problem logging into the main account once booting up at that point. I have a hub for the NVME memory, but waiting on a larger card (this other spare I had laying around just a 256gb) I’m just wondering if the hub with internal SSD will not have the same issue as the external WDblack 4TB (powering off on reboot) And I guess there’s nothing to adjust on the Mac side to make the WD not power down since it’s getting power from the port… and anyway shouldn’t be a problem if I just keep the computer on all the time?
@@mom2artists the drive should definitely power up when you power up the computer. That’s pretty weird. My zip drives always power up when I boot the computer. In fact any drive I connect to the MINI that’s a bus powered drive all mount. You should definitely have a back up internal user account that’s an administrator that is not the same name as your external so you can always get into the computer if the external user drive isn’t mounting for some reason definitely go for a thunderbolt for or USB 4 drive as they are faster than the internal storage by a little bit and I found that the USB three point one drives seem to have some permission issues but your drive should definitely power up when you boot up the computer
Is it ok to do disk partitioning then start doing the steps in the video to one of the partitions? I bought a 4tb storage and I want to use it as 2-2tb. Thanks a lot for doing these videos! Really helpful and useful!
@abdulmajeed-1110 you don’t need to partition just crest two APFS containers they will share the same drive but will mount as two separate drives. Or you can partition them if wanted if you want the data to be on its own partition.
@@MacSoundSolutionsHello! I am trying to move my user file to the external drive following the steps on the video but there is an error keeps showing saying that “you don’t have permission to access 24C101……”. How can I fix this?
A huge speed difference internal to external drive. Apple screwed new M4 mini on this. My internal SSD is 3122 on the MiniM1 and 5929 on my gaming PC. Looks like Apple did this on purpose on the small internal for the mini
Really helpful video, I do plan to get the mac mini m4 256gb next year sometime when I get enough for it. I currently use a gaming pc I built a couple years ago but this new mac mini might be something I can use on the side.
Thank you for this comprehensive tutorial. I am still a bit worried about how stable the user folder will be on an external drive? What happens if the systems somehow lost the connection and un-mounts the drive? Can you just re-mount it (plug it in) or do you have to restart and login again?
Thank you for letting us know about the Amazon special, I just placed my order and although it will take a few weeks to arrive the total with taxes and coupon applied was $541.26, that's almost a $100 savings.
@@Jgonzalezjuy1 At the time to checkout the item it popped up right there under "payment method" right above where you add your reward points and I applied it. I wonder if you have to be a Prime member to get the added discount?
@@Jgonzalezjuy1 Not sure if my other reply made it. At the time that you're in the checkout section right there under :payment method" it popped up for me right above where the rewards points are located.
Wow, this was exactly what I was looking for, thank you for this detailed guide. As a developer I need the extra space for all my docker sh*t and the 512 just don't cut it.
Jaw dropping, it's time for me to upgrade and i'm looking at this very closely. In fact i was waiting for the Mac Studio M4 because of the reported fan noise with the Mac Mini M4 Pro. I use Protools Ultimate with HD Native and HD i/o...
The internal drive is going to be replaceable at some point, since it isn't soldered in. I am sure there will be 3rd party inexpensive upgrades at some point.
Important Update!!!!!!!!!!!!! Mac OS 15.2 made it so you cannot drag and drop your home folder to your external drive, there is a fix, new video coming soon.
So crooked
Fkin apple :D
This tutorial is GOLDEN. I have watched dozens of other videos explaining basically the same thing but with a lot of technical background that I feel are not necessary. I trust Lance as a savvy user, as I feel I am, but I am not as technically proficient as a lot of guys out there. I just need to set things up quickly and efficiently without paying Apple more than necessary. Thanks Lance.
Some good info here, thanks. Setting up and transferring Mac data isn't always fun. I may have to get a new machine and give this a try.
just bought my M4 base model yesterday. follow this tutorial and everything runs smooth. this is my first mac OS device btw. yay!
I picked up a used mac for my 15yo daughter to use garageband. I cant tell you how helpful your videos are to someone who has been using Windows for 20+ years. I have learned alot from your videos and I am now building a hackintosh for myself without messing up her mac. I appreciate the info!
At 12:50 you illustrate how one user can’t see into another’s home folders, as expected. Can you test whether these privileges hold for the home folders you copied to the external?
If you have multiple people using your computer you would want this privacy feature to be in place on all their external folders.
@@kevinkendall2182they are not accessible by other users on the same Mac. You can also encrypt the external drive, but there is a small work around.
@@maridaudran thanks for the kind words much appreciated!
But bro, Hackintosh is about to be over when Apple stop supporting x86
Another convert and believer! I've been a convert from Windows since the late 1990s, when Windows was version 3.1 and built on DOS. There was a virtual genius at my post office where I worked who took me under his wing and introduced me to Macintosh. My life changed forever. Welcome aboard, and enjoy the ride.
Picked base model this week. Bestbuy Black Friday sale have good deals on external SSD this week. Picked up Crucial X10 2 TB SSD for 150$. Read up to 2k MB but whatever. Fast enough for what I used it for. I followed Lance's tips. When installing, I dragged the installer icon to the Application folder on external drive. Show up in Launchpad automatically. Loved the size. I can take it with me when I'm traveling. Plugged to hotel's room tv.
Awesome video! If anyone is experiencing their Mac mini m4 crashing and restarting after connecting an external drive, here's something that might help. Sometimes, simply preventing disk sleep from the settings menu isn’t enough to stop it from sleeping and I suspect this could be the issue I was having, and what worked for me was entering the following commands in Terminal:
sudo pmset -a disksleep 0
sudo pmset -a sleep 0
After applying these, my Mac mini hasn’t crashed so far (still testing, but fingers crossed!). Hope this helps someone out there!
I will note it down in case I come across it next time. Thanks.
Horrible, this is a fix most people won't be able to implement....
It happened again, not long ago after my "fix." I've tried a myriad of different things that so far till now seem to hopefully have worked again. Here are a couple to mention:
1. Prevented the external nvme enclosure drive from being indexed by spotlight.
2. Increased the time it takes for the display to turn off after a screen saver becomes active to 5 minutes or 10 minutes.
The second suggestion with the display setting came from a forum post where someone was having seemingly the exact same issue as I did and someone else suggested it was a display or GPU issue (even though they didn't mention an external drive being an issue). When my mac would recover from the crash/restart, I would take the error log and ask ChatGPT about it, and it responds, claiming it's a kernel panic related to the display or GPU (Currently using HDMI + 4k high refresh rate monitor).
@@Sarsour_ so what is the issue, I can sleep two external drives and no crashes. But you can just set the settings for drives to not sleep when the display sleeps if you want.
@MacSoundSolutions It seems like the issue has been resolved so far after my last update mentioned about increasing the screen's time to switch off after a screen saver to 5 minutes, which is what I set it at. That was also a solution I read off an apple forum thread, as I mentioned.
The sleep prevention settings from the settings menu and the terminal command weren't enough to solve it for my case in particular, so hopefully this helps anybody who might ever come across the issue, though I should probably document these suggestions in a forum post.
Great stuff! You are helping a lot of folks beat Apple scam with their ridiculous upgrade prices. This is Gold. Thanks a lot.
SOME IMPORTANT NOTES: the external applications folder was not visable at 9:46 in the video when it should have been. It needs to live outside the user folder not in it, it was an edit mistake not to show inside the home folder at that point and FYI the 512 SSD option is twice as fast on the write speeds but not the read speeds. The 512 is 4000MBs write - the 256 is 2000MBs write , both are 3000MB read. Also Apps like Pro Tools get installed to All Users and the apps don't take up that much space so don't try and move apps for all users into the external applications folder, I would test apps on a one by one bases when moved externally. You can install their sound libraries samples etc on to the external drive and point the apps to them.
And the speed difference only translates to marginal performance gains in all but a very few cases anyway. Unless you're moving 50GB files around all the time, you're not even going to notice the difference. It's all very fast once you get to 2000 MB/s.
I tested the boot time of an 8GB Windows 11 virtual machine using VMware on the internal SSD and an external SSD with a top speed of 1000MB/s, and the latter was only one second slower -- 10 seconds vs 9 seconds.
@@EnglishMike👍
@@MacSoundSolutions I had read about that but opted to step up the unified memory a notch instead. I’ve been working with a 2018 MBP 15” with 1TB drive and loads of memory but it struggles with photoshop and Topaz AI tasks. My wife’s 2022 MacBook Air 15” M2 standard build 512 MB mops floor with it performance wise. Excited to put my new mini to work. My first computer was an EPSON with an 8088 cpu. It cost around CDN$2200 in 1986, 30 MB hard drive and two floppy disks, monochrome monitor
Does this work with a 4TB Xternal drive as well or is it limited to 2TB? And can you transfer/migrate everything from your M2 to the new M4 with xternal drive you've setup so you don't have to reinstall everything again?...Sorry for all the questions TY so much for al the NF0!!
Also DOes it effect the speed for Audio recording from DAW's using the xternal drive or does the Mini think that the xternal is an internal and works as if it is an internal? FYI I'm Using UAD Apollo x6's.....TY for the vids
This worked like a charm. I added a 1TB SSD . external SSD is faster than internal 256GB
Ive never seen a more concise and to the point video, truly a masterpiece of a tutorial! Especially since its basic use case and not weird one off test/use case. Really appreciate the work you put into this!
@@zeldfep thanks!
Lance, you can get your external drive’s apps to automatically appear in the Launchpad by placing a symlink of the external drive’s Applications folder in your user folder.
As a new Mac user, would you please expand on this further.
Google: terminal command for creating symlinks. Will explain everything in a step by step
I do the same with mail, have a lot of mailboxes, have the main mail library folder symlinked to the external drive. And photo library placed to external too.
This didn't work for me. I tried it just a few minutes ago. I created an alias to Applications folder on my external drive, moved the alias to my home folder (also on the external drive), and then renamed the alias to "Applications"
@@mghumphrey Indeed, an alias will not work. You have to use Terminal to create a symlink.
That's the first actually helpful video on how to use your external storage in the most optimal way. I had to mess with sym-links a lot to make something work and if you know anything about MacOS this can get sloppy fast. This information is a lifesaver!
Thanks for this no BS video - just the information I needed! New subscriber here 😉
This video was EXTREMELY helpful, thank you! I'm purchasing an M4 mini base with an extra 8 GBs of RAM around the first week of March (tax refund), but I'm purchasing parts for a Thunderbolt 4 dock and at least 4TBs M.2 SSD storage now so I'll be ready. I've used Macs on and off since 2009 for podcasting and videos, but not since Mavericks on a 2014 27-inch Intel Haswell iMac. I forgot that Apple hides the user folder, and it was very helpful to know which application files are transferable to the external drive.
I've saved this video for March when I purchase my M4 mini. I plan to go back to content creation, and iMovie has always been my go-to, Audacity (now Tenacity) for sequencing, eight-to-ten Firefox tabs open for research and a couple of other items before I posted a show on iTunes and a website (haven't done this several years, but I'm willing to try it again).
Thanks again for the video.
Got mine yesterday. Moved mail to external with symlink to original folder, photo library external, steam library external and whiskey bottles external. Easy enough. App Store is also configured to put >1 GB apps to external.
This tutorial is amazing! It's exactly what I needed. I wanted to use a Mac mini as my DAW, but some of the digital audio stuff wanted to install on the system drive and only the system drive. I ended up running out of room and had nothing but problems. After using this tutorial, it looks like smooth sailing now. Thanks!
Thanks!
Much appreciated King!
Great video. It helped me understand the Mac file system. I had my documents and desktop folders on my iCloud and wanted it on my Mac. This helped me so much 🙏🙏
@MacSoundSolutions Fantastic videos Lance! And thanks to ALL who have been contributing info to Lance! These videos are really sharing something important and needed. So happy to see all the updates on processes Lance. THANK YOU ROCK --AND-- COMPUTER STAR!!!!! 🤩🤩🤩
when i got my mac mini base model i installed sequoia to my 2 tb NMVe external and used that as my drive works a treat
Yes works well, you just can’t use Apple intelligence. But some folks would rather not use it.
@@MacSoundSolutions There really isn't much worth using yet.
@@EnglishMike agreed just pointing it out
@@MacSoundSolutions ApplePay will also not work.
A million thanks, my friend, for your time and effort. Your ideas and tips are extraordinary-you’ve saved us from a lot of head-scratching and headaches.
Great video, simple, concise but thorough, thank you! I've been using a Mac for decades but with how often Apple changes things around have completely lost touch on how to do this.
AWESOME; I knew there had to be a way to do this, Thank You!!! I purchased a mini several years ago with a 512GB drive and suffered great pains trying to keep enough free space (Pics, videos, Logic Pro plugins and loops, etc.). Apple has done things to prevent upgrading physical components such as soldering the memory and/or storage. I've been contemplating upgrading to an M4 or going back to a PC.
@@stevehaines256 new video setting up from scratch on a mini posting tomorrow.
Hey Lance. I followed your guide and have some other insight to offer based on my experience thus far. I use encrypted APFS. This is a little tricky because MacOS no longer prompts for an APFS password at boot up on Apple Silicon Macs. It needs to be pre-mounted. The way I was able to work around that limitation was to use the secondary admin user I created to login first, mount the external drive with my home directory on it under that user, and then lock the screen and login as me from the lock screen.
The other thing I did was to hookup a 43" LG 4K UHD TV as the display and set the resolution down from the native 3840x2160 to 2560x1440 - and it looks STUNNING with retina-like smoothness. Not bad for a TV I paid $189 for.
I hope some find this helpful. Cheers!
@@6StringPassion. you are spot on I did same today, if you set the internal user to auto login with the encrypted drive in its keychain you only have to type the password once to login the external user and bingo.
@@MacSoundSolutions COOL! Thx.
@@MacSoundSolutionshi lance, I’m awfully sorry for the silly question (I am far from adept)… I also set my external as encrypted and now cannot log in. I know it’s a pain but could you walk me through how to solve this as I now cannot log in with or without my external disk plugged in?
@@TheItalianNomad new video on this posted today or tomorrow. Basically you need to have the internal backup user administrator account. Log into that on boot, the encrypted drive will ask for its password, click save in keychain, them you can switch users even log out of the internal at this point, but when ever you boot up you have to log into the internal user first and the encrypted drive will mount because its now in the keychain of the internal user and then just switch to the external user, it's a little bit of a pain but if you don't shut down often then its not a major big issue.
@@MacSoundSolutions thank you!
Excellent tutorial Lance! Based on what I’ve watch, you are top notch for clarity. Best!
Excellent work, thank you very much for taking the time to delve into this, Very cool! BTW, B&H Photo has the Mini in stock and is asking $560, and if you have their payboo credit card you save the tax, so you pay $20 more but they ship now instead of a couple of weeks later...
The are always $100 less at the Apple Education store online and there's no verification.
Amazing! as a IT admin, I really appreceiate your detailed steps for the end user, some many just assume the user know what they meant, etc.
This is really excellent. I am awaiting a new Mac mini 4 and am thinking about how to set it up so this has been a big help. Thanks
Thank you for this! Today I am ordering my Mac Mini M4. Based on your two videos, I have bought a 2TB Samsung Thunderbolt 4 and enclosure and will be following your 10 step transfer process. Extremely helpful and oh so timely! Many thanks, like and a sub for you today.
0:11 thats what my girl says.
Ain’t no way LOL
🤣
Excellent video. Thanks from all of us over here in Frankenmuth, Michigan !
Costco has the base M4 Mini for $499 until early December - got one yesterday ☺️
Hello. I recently a Mac Mini M4 (my first Mac, long time Win user). I got the base model, and after seing you video I got an external drive. I reset the Mini to factory (it was already on 15.2), and went through your guide. After setting up the folder, activating the Home Folder and upon the first restart, I can't login again: I get Unable to Log.... "Logging into the account failed because an error occurred." I got a backup admin account before to avoid getting into trouble. The only difference is that I kept the external drive as exFat (thought about keeping it readable on PC as well). Using the backup admin I changed to APFS, and now it works. It may be obvious anyone Mac savvy, I just dropped here as it might save someones pain. Very important to have the second admin user to recover from such errors. Thanks for your guide.
Yes must have the backup user and must format in APFS I believe I say that in all the videos? Sorry for the hassle. I will be posting a new video soon. That’s got some more tips as I keep learning stuff after using it this way for a month.
@ yes you mentioned the AFS. My fault, not yours. I didn’t understand that as a “must”, and when things went wrong, that’s was my prime suspect. Again, thanks for the videos and tips, it really helped me setup my first ever Mac. In addition to the drive itself, I benefited from several small tips: seeing how you accessed certain options (folder options, visualization etc) and performed certain tasks, the drag and drop of installed software etc… all helped me get around. Now I’m exploring and learning how to use the OS and perform tasks.
Does Apple Intelligence still work? I know if you put the operating system completely on an external drive. It will not. Will it work with just the home folder moved?
Yes it works guess I should have mentioned that again in this video but did on previous video.
I don’t know u never seen your videos till this one and I subbed great video boom!! All the way from the cribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago 🇹🇹
I went to Trinidad when I was a kid :)
Was it for carnival
@@tichaonanhlangano1426 was on my way to Granada
Great video! I was tempted to at least bump internal to 512gb, but with this method the internal is basically just a boot disc so no need!
Yeah that’s true, the 256 is still a lot slower than the 512 but still fast enough. I bumped it up to 512GB because after all some data will always be written on it so for longevity it will probably make a difference
@jooplin I've seen people do speed tests showing 256 is the same speed is 512 for this generation. I thought it was just M2 that they took away the RAID for the 256 model?!
@@aerobrain2001 hmm maybe I need to check again, but I saw one guy using the BlackMagic Disk test and it was roughly half the speed of the 512GB with the M4 Mac Mini, it has two chips now but that could just be because the 256GB was really full maybe?
@jooplin yeah could be, I'll need to double check myself as well. Watch so many different reviews it's definitely possible I've got muddled :-)
@@aerobrain2001 I am just thinking to myself, if you really try this approach with the home folder, than 250Gb maybe will last an easy 10 years. If I assume it's a premium quality SSD it could last about 150TBW, I think that's a very generous estimation. Could be trouble if you have consistently high workloads and will more often swap memory than maybe you could run into trouble in the future, also a faster SSD will make the memory swaps less noticable. Also the fresh new OS will get cluttered and you'll never know if the storage requirements for newer OS versions will get higher I personally would always second guess my 256GB choice if I had hiccups or any kind of trouble, so I went for the safe bet with 512GB. The memory upgrades aren't that steep if you order somewhere else than Apple. I got mine with 16GB and 512GB now for 763€, would have cost me 929€ in the Apple Store. Thanks for listening to my TED Talk
Tolle Erklärung, die beste, die ich bisher hatte. Vielen Dank fürs teilen!
Can’t wait to get my new Mac mini and do this process 😌☺️😊 your videos are on point. Thank you for what you do!
Wow…. This You tube channel is great. I am totally going to have to come back to these videos. So much good stuff here.
I would also like to mention the new Mac Mini also has upgradeable storage with 2 slots in each one. Now both drives are diffrent and also they need to come out of another Mac Mini and you also need a DFU Restore from another Mac to make it work :)
Oh man! This is great stuff! This is exactly what I was looking for. I have yet to buy the Mac mini as I am still struggling with which configuration to choose. That could save me quite a bit of money. Just subscribed.
Nice tutorial, didn’t know you could do this, thanks for sharing
Oh wow so the iCloud library folder copy also went to the external. That’s amazing since I found out that it’s the cause of that hidden system data space more than cache.
People shouldn’t have to do this. Apple needs to change how much they charge for storage.
Apple button guy needs to patch this with a future update.
Sure
People needs to stop buying Apple laptops.
@ why?
Apple's business practices are literally demonic!
A helpful tip: order the Zike drive enclosure allowing plenty of time; it ships from Hong Kong and takes awhile, depending on where you live. I have my Mini and NVMe all ready to go, but still waiting for Zike .... yike!
Sorry seems they’re a bit back ordered due to my videos 😅 I will send them an email to see what the word is.
@@MacSoundSolutions Update. Zike drive enclosure arrived today (Vancouver, Washington). It took a total of 13 days from the order date, which I don't think is too bad for all the way from Honk Honk. For folks ordering one, I'd allow two weeks delivery time in the U.S. to be on the safe side. The enclosure looks fantastic and is well made.
For folks getting an error when copying their home folder. Log into an internal user admin then create a new user admin, this is the one you will be copying to the external drive, don’t log into it, copy the new user to the external drive, it will ask for your current logged in users password, once copied activate the new path of the new user. Reboot and log into the external user. The issue is you can’t copy the user when logged into it you need to do it with a different admin user account.
Your videos are so informative and helpful, and they are really fun to watch! Great voice, if I may add.
I am one of those that have ecountered an error when copying the home folder to the external drive. Certain files in the Library folder can't be copied. After some digging, I discovered that a folder called "group.com.apple.CoreSpeech" in the "Group Containers" folder cannot be copied. (this was causing the issue)
I want to try the method you have mentioned here, but what do you mean by "activate the new path of the new user"?
@good info, to activate it’s just selecting the new home folder path, for the external home folder. I show it in the video. Once you copy the user folder to the external you have to set the new user location / path.
@@MacSoundSolutions
Thanks, clear!
Quick question, how come were you able to copy the Home folder to the external drive for the user account that you were logged in with? It didn't cause issues?
@ maybe the latest OS updates changed something. I got errors when I tried to copy recently, 15.2 changed some things. I will be putting an updated video in the next couple of days. But copied no problem when I was logged into my backup internal account when copying the account I wanted on the external drive.
@@MacSoundSolutions
Awesome, and everything worked for me as well! Successfully copied the entire home folder to the external drive!
Thanks for the amazing tutorials! Can't wait for the next release!
Glad to see someone mention the little things that can trip you up...
Thanks for the very detailed explanation! Could you also show us how to Time Machine your HomeX?
Will do in the next video
Thank you. Great video. Will definitely follow when my new M4 Mac Mini arrives. Take care.
I ordered mac mini 4 with 24 Ram & 512GB….. I will just use the external ssd for the apps,since apple already make the option for installing large apps on SSD…. Thanks a lot for
Nice and the 512 does get faster right speeds on the SSD and the 256. I originally thought they were the same but the 512 gets double the right speeds in the same speeds as the 256
Getting a mac mini in a couple of weeks, and very much looking forward to setting it up supported by your excellent videos on the subject. Much appreciated my man 🤗
Can you also unplug the drive and start the mac mini. So that we can see what happens and how can we login to the back up user account.
with no home folder, it will not start
Thanks for the great video, I am definitely going to do exactly the same. Question is, what would happen if the external drive goes bad? What are the options to keep the data safe other than time machine backups?
@@ibs37i anti virus, little snitch, vpn or clone your drive with chrono sync
It's getting better and better! Thank you sir.
As a Windows user who is deciding to switch to Mac, this is a very useful and detailed explanation. Loved it. Thanks 🙏🏽
Subscribed ✅
Stick to cricket..
Mac is not for you pjt
@@Unacceptable. Why bro?
Will this still work if you plan to use Apple Intelligence and how is the Apple pay Security?
Think i will put two accounts on mine. a small local admin one i use rarely. and a large external one for my main account. so i can always get it if the external isn’t available
That’s a great idea
Hello, me again, nice to see that you are taking all the risks we do not want to take
I haven't bought my Apple mini yet, I downloaded your video and take notes on every thing you do. You are a fast thinker, I am not. Many thanks for all the info.
never owned a mac, but still enjoyed watching it. maybe I'll buy a mac
switched 20yrs ago an never went back even though use windows suite 90% of time. microsoft just runs infinitely better with no issues on apple hardware with opencore. 2009 mbp causes zero issues compared to brand new multi thousand pc
@@RichieKeane Funny, there was a guy on another comment thread that said he needed to run a Windows 11 virtual machine on his macOS system because the macOS version of MS Office had issues with the stuff he was doing...
@@EnglishMikeruns as normal win 10?11 pc just pick at the boot screen if you use olcp
I bought an M4 Mac mini with 512 GB of storage on it, and I love his idea. I just bought a 1 TB SSD drive to do this process. My question is one of order. I want to migrate stuff from my current iMac onto the new machine. Should I do the process described in this video first and THEN do the migrating step, or should I migrate everything to the new machine and then do this process. Note that the iMac also has a 512 GB drive and is not full yet. Thanks!
Make a Time Machine backup, you can then set up your new Mac MINI, but don’t log into your Apple account yet creat an internal administrative user account and give it a different name than your old user account that you’re going to copy over to your external drive and this internal user account will be your back up internal administrative account. connect your new Drive format in APFS and connect your Time Machine back up drive and copy your user home folder over to the back up drive. Then create a folder on your new drive called Users then you can copy your home folder/user from your Time Machine back up into the users folder on the external drive. So new drive name/ users/ user home folder. Then create the same name user account by adding a new user in system settings and then activate the external user account and reboot. Now you’ll be running off the external user account and you can now log into your Apple account. Because copying all your data to the internal drive can get messy because then you’re gonna have to remove it all then your last step is to migrate your data from your Time Machine back up, but only the data not the user account that you already copied to the external drive otherwise you’re gonna have the internal hard drive get all full Makes sense. Watch my latest video on Time Machine backups that pretty much has all the info in there again, one of the most important things is to not log into your Apple account when your first setting up the Mac and Apple will try to get you to do that. Don’t do it until you have the external user workingthen login to your Apple account. Good luck.
I can't tell you how much I appreciate you making this video. Thank You! 👍
These video's have been great! I have the m4 256gb. The home folders are now running off the the external drive. Of which runs faster than the internal. Thank you for making great videos on this. Very simple to follow! 👍
Yes I was surprised I was getting better speeds externally, pretty sweet. Thanks!
Amazon is back-ordered until after Christmas. Also, Costco has even better prices but they are all out of stock until December, or later. Seems the Minis is flying off the shelves.
I’m glad I ordered a week after launch (saw reviews etc) and already have mine. Great piece of hardware, shame on Apple to include 256 GB SSDs in 2024… (or they could just ask 50€ for the upgrade, that is what costs a full drive with controller, so the extra 256 GB without a controller for Apple must cost 10€ or so (at most…)
@@ricarmig The people who upgraded are paying the Apple tax for you :)
Apple Education store always has them for $100 less and there's no verification.
Wow, lots of good stuff in there. Lots of areas covered that I have touched in the past, but a few gems in there that I didn't know about. I'll definitely review this video again if/when I get my next mac mini or studio or imac (probably in a year or two). Thanks for doing this and for all the good information/tricks/hints.
I’m curious if you move the home folder onto an external drive, if the external drive dies on you, and you get a new drive then give it the same name, will the Time Machine backup recognise the new drive as the right location to restore your data to?
I believe it will, I’m going to check out Time Machine and do a video on it very soon, but I already know you can back up the external drive combined with the internal and I believe you could just copy the home folder on Time Machine to the new drive and then activate it
@@MacSoundSolutionsThanks mate!
Great video 👏 I can’t believe I haven’t come across your channel before. As a long time Mac user (since the late 1990’s), and a long-time IT professional, I can appreciate the work you’ve put into creating very useful videos like this! I’m just trying to decide what to do with my 12+ year old Mac Mini since I upgraded to the M1 Mac Mini a few years ago, since these Mac products just keep going and going like the energizer bunny 😂
Which drive is used for swap memory with this setup?
I asked ChatGPT ;) It would affect my choice for 256 vs 512GB version. Maybe someone can corroborate this but it seems correct to me:
Which drive is used for swap memory when you use the Mac mini m4 with the home folder and all non Apple apps moved to an external nvme 40GB drive? Is it the internal drive or the external drive? I’m asking because if it’s the external drive I won’t need to buy the 512GB version but am set with the 256GB version. I can then use that cash to get more RAM instead, like 24GB instead of the base version’s 16GB.
Answer:
When using a Mac Mini M4 with the home folder and non-Apple apps moved to an external NVMe SSD, the decision of where macOS uses swap memory depends on how the system handles the external and internal drives.
How macOS Handles Swap Memory
1. Swap Memory Basics:
• macOS uses the internal SSD by default for swap memory because it’s tightly integrated into the Apple Silicon architecture.
• Swap memory is critical for system performance when your RAM is fully utilized. Apple optimizes the internal SSD for this task because of its high speed and reliability.
2. Moving the Home Folder to an External Drive:
• While your home folder and application data are stored on the external drive, macOS still uses the internal SSD for swap memory.
• External NVMe drives are not used for swap memory, even if the external drive is fast and has ample free space. macOS prioritizes the internal SSD for this task because of its secure and low-latency connection to the system.
3. Why the Internal SSD Is Critical for Swap:
• The internal SSD is integrated into the system for macOS operations, including virtual memory and swap.
• Thunderbolt connections, while fast, have higher latency compared to the direct connection of the internal SSD.
Recommendation Based on Setup
• 256GB Internal SSD with 24GB RAM:
• If you increase the RAM to 24GB, macOS will use less swap memory overall, making the 256GB internal SSD sufficient for system tasks.
• Your external NVMe can handle the majority of storage needs, including the home folder and applications.
• 512GB Internal SSD with 16GB RAM:
• If you stay with 16GB RAM, the internal SSD will need to handle more swap activity, and the 512GB version will provide better durability (more NAND chips) and faster speeds for intensive tasks.
Verdict
• If swap memory stays on the internal SSD (which it does), upgrading to 24GB RAM will reduce swap usage, making the 256GB SSD + external NVMe a practical setup.
• If you often run memory-intensive tasks (e.g., video editing, large simulations), the extra RAM will benefit you more than the additional internal SSD space.
Summary:
Investing in 24GB RAM with the 256GB SSD + external NVMe is a better option if your workflow involves heavy multitasking but doesn’t require excessive internal storage.
macOS always uses the swap memory file on the boot drive. So, in this example, the swap memory will be written to the internal SSD since that's still the boot drive.
@@MutantWorm This is why you should never depend on ChatGPT. It's mostly accurate, but the gains are marginal at best. Assuming you keep your 256GB drive under 60% full, that's more than enough to maximize the SSD's performance and durability. The speed difference for the swapper's activity is not even going to be noticeable between 256GB and 512GB. The extra bandwidth of the larger drive is only useful for copying very large amounts of data (e.g. 50GB or more on a regular basis) which is what your fast TB4 external drive is for.
You only need more memory if the memory pressure goes into the red and maybe the yellow. If it stays in the green, then upgrading the RAM or the SSD will do next to nothing for you in terms of performance. A fast Thunderbolt 4 SSD solution is by far the cheaper option and you won't notice any slowdown.
I tested the boot time of my 8GB Windows 11 VM on the internal drive and a "slow" (1000MB/s) external SSD. The internal took 9 seconds, the "slow" external took 10 seconds. If I had used a fast PCIe Gen 4 drive instead, there would have been no difference.
And unless you're a very heavy user, there is no way you're going to wear out your internal SSD in less than 10 years, and probably not even 15 years, especially if you're using an external drive for your home folder.
My new kit includes a Mac Mini M4, with 24 Gb of RAM, a small
hard drive, and a Samsung 995 Pro 2TB SSD, in an Acasis container.
I have watched your videos on the use of an external SSD, and have gone 'nuclear'.
Using the 'Apple Support' instructions, I now have all my o/s on my external SSD, and
my internal 256 Drive is 'empty'. My transfer speeds are c. 2800mb/s.
Everything works, it's per Apple instructions: sorted.
Thanks for your videos. I did add an external 1TB SSD to my M4 Mini, and migrated my home folder to it and activated it, however, I cannot copy ANY applications from my internal drive to my new external drive. I tried downloading a new app from the Mac App Store and it loaded onto the internal hard disk, without giving me any options to install it on the new external drive. I also cannot delete non-systems apps from the Applications folder on the internal drive, despite it not being locked and that it has Read/Write permissions for "Everyone". This smells like a permissions problem but I cannot see what it is
You need to be logged into the external account and then just drag and drop the applications folder from the internal drive to the external drive and if that doesn’t work, log back into your internal backup user and do the same thing. Don’t copy the individual applications copy the whole folder
I had the exact same issue. Logging into the backup account to delete apps worked for me! Many Thanks!
@@2epete I have the same issue to delete non apple apps, so what did we do wrong, why are only a few having this problem? Thanks
@ I’ll leave it to the Mac experts to answer what we could be doing to cause the issue, I was happy to learn all you need to do is log in to he backup account to delete them from the system hard drive.
@@mattmc190 you need to log into an internal administrator account to delete the internal apps. If you didn’t make one you can easily add it now then delete the apps.
Another approach to moving the home folder on new machines is to make the first account you create the “Backup Account” and when creating a new admin account on “Users & Groups” you also change the home folder so the first login on that account will already be in the external folder.
@@soniccinos good point but I don’t think you have access to the advanced options until you creat the user on the internal drive, will have look.
Can we unplug the external drive or change the external drive after making it our home folder if yes will it have any repercussions?
Yes, you can but of course you want to have that back up user because if your drive is not attached and you go to login to the external home account, you will have issues so you need a back up internal administrative user so you can log into your Mac when the external drive is not connected
@MacSoundSolutions so if the internal drive user account is present and the external drive is disconnected will it automatically switch back to using the internal one?
@@rajsubhodI think that you have to login to the admin backup account and change the home path
Slow and easy to follow tutorial. Thanks. Great!
Why move anything?. Why not set up the internal admin account first? When logged into this, setup your main user account and then change the home folder location before even logging into it. Then when you log in to your proper account for the first time, everything is created on the external drive from the very start. No need to move anything. I assume this will work, I don’t see why not.
good one but need proof to see if it work
@ I want to try this, but I set mine up to boot entirely off the external drive. I want to change it so it uses the internal drive with the user folder on the external, but I’d want to clone the external drive first in case I want to go back, and I don’t have a drive big enough (my external is 4TB).
It also seems counterproductive to move applications to an external drive when the internal is much faster. You’d need a LOT of apps to fill the 256GB internal drive. Having user data on the external is fine though. I though this video would be about a hardware mod, not just plugging another drive in 😁
@@Stabby666 the external is faster than the base internal 256GB. Plus, running the OS on an external drive means Apple Intelligence and Apple Pay don’t work (which I didn’t know when setting up).
I’m actually doing a Time Machine backup now and will try my method and report back.
Oh - also, I noticed my idle power consumption was a little higher than others were reporting, which I assume is due to the OS being on an external drive. Hopefully with the OS on the internal drive, idle power use will be reduced.
@ if an external drive is faster than the internal then that’s a terrible design I think. The PCI-E bus should be the fastest way to transfer data so maybe it’s cheaper controller chips or something.
I used your part two of how to move your home folder to an external hard drive on my new Mac mini for base thank you.
If you live within a 2 hr drive of a Microcenter, these have been $499 for over a week. Atlanta stores restocked 27+ units today, spread across 2 stores. Again $499 for over a week now. If using MICROCENTER’s credit card, $475 before tax.
$500 at amazon now and costco, BB might price match = $499
They are $499 at the Apple online education store and there is no verification for the education discount.
This is a video worth savings. It’s saved to watch again. I just Subscribed.
Beware: Finder Tags appear to be broken with iCloud with a user folder on an external drive. I’m setting up a new mini. Everything is normal, except Finder tags are for local files only. They will not sync to iCloud.
Interesting. Anyone else get this?
@ Would be great if someone knows the fix. But I’d figured out the external user folder with iCloud sync 10 days ago (before these videos came out). But I realized last night that Tags syncing is broken. It seems to fail with the move to an external folder. I’ve now made a created a user folder several times with slightly different approaches. And they all break Finder Tags with iCloud. Maybe it’s just something weird with my iCloud account. But I can’t make it work.
Does the Apple Intelligence work on the external drive?
Apple Intelligence is not copied to the external
Honestly this is like going back 20 years having to mess around like this.
Apple should be ashamed.
Just put a decent amount of storage in at a decent price and more people will buy them.
If you've been an Apple user for 20 years, you're used to it! I once had to help someone out whose macBook had run out of storage -- he had a 128GB internal SSD.
I have been working on a Mac for over 10 years, but I learned something new. 😂
Thanks!
Thanks Dr!
@@MacSoundSolutions So Will your second video you mentioned at the beginning of this one on how to make this move if you already did what I did?
@ watch part 2 Buy the Base Storage and do this! Move your Home folder to an external drive PART 2
th-cam.com/video/YFuOcsi_eFY/w-d-xo.html
Nicely done. A very helpful properly detailed demo that can be super useful to so many to save money. For older minis and the Mac Studio maybe the Satechi hub is a good option to give you a base hub with USB-A ports and SD/microSD card slots with home drive in it. I'm sure there will something similar for the M4 mini form factor soon too.
Eagerly awaiting the video where you describe how to migrate data from your old Mac onto an external drive for the M4 Mac mini.
Coming out today!
thank you for the tutorial, its perfectly what i was looking for and wondering
i used ur set up on my new base mac mini - external ssd 2tb : after logging in to icloud , if any one has issues with server apps after ie app store , apple tv etc... just log out icloud and re log in in resolves it , thx for ur easy set up
Great JOB, THANKS. I was unable to copy my apps over to the new external drive, only shortcuts appeared. Thoughts?
Yes copy the whole applications folder don’t open it and drag the apps over. So you don’t need to creat an app folder just copy the whole app folder from the internal to the external.
@@MacSoundSolutionsI had same problem. Tried it both ways and never got more than the Utilities folder.
It was a very nice video. Thank you!!!
However, when copying user folders from the internal disc to an external disc, the library folder was not copied at all. The pop-up window says that it cannot be copied.
Couldn't I copy it because my mac OS version is 15.2?
you have to log out of your apple account and icloud apps before copying, other wise make a time machine backup and copy it from the TM backup as it is not tethered to the cloud or apple account.
@@MacSoundSolutions I have the same issue
@@mtbmonk7076 @ turn off all iCloud apps under iCloud and Siri then log out Apple account and reboot. Log into an internal user admin account and copy the home folder. If this still doesn’t work make a Time Machine backup and copy the home folder from the TM backup but it should.
@@MacSoundSolutions Thank you for your advice.
Library holders could be copied from TM backup!
You are a genius!
Thanks so much! Great tutorial. I have a follow-up question. How do you get Apps from outside the app store to install on the Application folder on the external drive. Those drag and drop installations are easy-enough to circumvent, however the Spotify installer (e.g.) uses the internal Application folder. Do I have to copy and delete like you did in the beginning with Garage Band, Key Note, etc. or is there a smoother solution?
@@SandroCannova apps over 1 gig can install on the external drive if downloaded from the App Store. Watch at the end of my latest video I show the best way to setup the applications folder on the external drive, some apps must live on the internal as they are only installed for all users, small apps that are sing user still need to be copied and then deleted.
Amazing, thank you very much for all you great work, and to the coffeemaker 😉🙏🥰.
Best regards from Sweden
So I saw this video a month or so ago and was convinced to buy myself a nice Christmas gift 🤣 I finally got around to going thru this with many pauses, rewinds, a few mistakes, but was able to get the mini setup after a few hours of “fun” before work this morning.
I had a spare 4TB SSD external drive laying around and used that.
I haven’t been brave enough to delete the original home folder since I didn’t want to create a brick right before walking out the door 😂
Anyway, this USB external seems to power off with the computer (duh) and so when the computer boots back up, it won’t see the external or let me log into the main acct.
It took me a bit to figure out that it was because it powered off.
So I just went over to the drive and unplugged/replugged and it was awake, and no problem logging into the main account once booting up at that point.
I have a hub for the NVME memory, but waiting on a larger card (this other spare I had laying around just a 256gb)
I’m just wondering if the hub with internal SSD will not have the same issue as the external WDblack 4TB (powering off on reboot)
And I guess there’s nothing to adjust on the Mac side to make the WD not power down since it’s getting power from the port… and anyway shouldn’t be a problem if I just keep the computer on all the time?
@@mom2artists the drive should definitely power up when you power up the computer. That’s pretty weird. My zip drives always power up when I boot the computer. In fact any drive I connect to the MINI that’s a bus powered drive all mount. You should definitely have a back up internal user account that’s an administrator that is not the same name as your external so you can always get into the computer if the external user drive isn’t mounting for some reason definitely go for a thunderbolt for or USB 4 drive as they are faster than the internal storage by a little bit and I found that the USB three point one drives seem to have some permission issues but your drive should definitely power up when you boot up the computer
Is it ok to do disk partitioning then start doing the steps in the video to one of the partitions? I bought a 4tb storage and I want to use it as 2-2tb.
Thanks a lot for doing these videos!
Really helpful and useful!
@abdulmajeed-1110 you don’t need to partition just crest two APFS containers they will share the same drive but will mount as two separate drives. Or you can partition them if wanted if you want the data to be on its own partition.
@ Tbh, I don’t know how containers work but I want to partition as I want the second 2TB be shared thru local network.
@ sure you can partition it, I did that to have windows installed on the same NVMe as Mac OS in my Intel Mac Pro.
@@MacSoundSolutionsHello!
I am trying to move my user file to the external drive following the steps on the video but there is an error keeps showing saying that “you don’t have permission to access 24C101……”. How can I fix this?
A huge speed difference internal to external drive. Apple screwed new M4 mini on this. My internal SSD is 3122 on the MiniM1 and 5929 on my gaming PC. Looks like Apple did this on purpose on the small internal for the mini
Really helpful video, I do plan to get the mac mini m4 256gb next year sometime when I get enough for it. I currently use a gaming pc I built a couple years ago but this new mac mini might be something I can use on the side.
Can you show us how to do iPhone backups on external drive like this too.
If you setup the home folder this way on the external drive all your iOS backups will go to the external user library folder in the home folder.
Thank you for this comprehensive tutorial. I am still a bit worried about how stable the user folder will be on an external drive? What happens if the systems somehow lost the connection and un-mounts the drive? Can you just re-mount it (plug it in) or do you have to restart and login again?
Thank you for letting us know about the Amazon special, I just placed my order and although it will take a few weeks to arrive the total with taxes and coupon applied was $541.26, that's almost a $100 savings.
Hi, I see the discounted price in Amazon but how did you add the coupon for additional $59?
@@Jgonzalezjuy1 At the time to checkout the item it popped up right there under "payment method" right above where you add your reward points and I applied it. I wonder if you have to be a Prime member to get the added discount?
@@Jgonzalezjuy1 Not sure if my other reply made it. At the time that you're in the checkout section right there under :payment method" it popped up for me right above where the rewards points are located.
Wow, this was exactly what I was looking for, thank you for this detailed guide. As a developer I need the extra space for all my docker sh*t and the 512 just don't cut it.
Jaw dropping, it's time for me to upgrade and i'm looking at this very closely. In fact i was waiting for the Mac Studio M4 because of the reported fan noise with the Mac Mini M4 Pro. I use Protools Ultimate with HD Native and HD i/o...
The internal drive is going to be replaceable at some point, since it isn't soldered in. I am sure there will be 3rd party inexpensive upgrades at some point.
Thank you! This was a really informative video, and the explanation was super clear!!!!
Great walk through!