10.5: Easily change the location of your home directory

Unfortunately, the procedure for moving a user folder, or all user folders, to an alternate volume under Tiger and earlier no longer works in Leopard; that procedure used NetInfo, and NetInfo has been replaced in Leopard by Directory Services. But for the most basic task — moving a user folder — Apple has made the process much easier in Leopard.

First, copy your home directory to the desired location; for example, to an external hard drive. (The ditto -rsrc command in Terminal is likely the quickest way, and guarantees you don’t miss anything or mess up permissions: sudo ditto -rsrc “/Users/username” “/Volumes/path-to-new-folder”.)

Then Control-click on your account’s name in the Accounts pane of System Preferences and choose the Advanced Options item that appears. In the new Advanced…