Having moved from a 1TB internal drive on my old Mac Mini to a M2 Pro Mac Mini I now find that I have very little space left in its measly 500GB drive.
Simple question. Which Apple Apps should I not move out to an external drive?
Also, are there any pitfalls to watch out for when moving Apps (both Apple & third party) off an internal drive?
Thanks
I ended up moving my photo library and videos to a large external drive when I migrated from a 1Tb iMac to an M2 Macbook Air with only 500Gb. I just have to avoid using Photos when I am not connected to the drive as it creates a new default library on the MBA.
I would be cautious about moving some Mac apps to an external drive. It is a pity that macOS doesn’t have the same cloud storage features as iOS.
You can’t remove Apple’s in built apps to another location. Other Apple apps and third party apps may or may not work when on an external drive - you would have to experiment.
My advice is to NOT try and move apps to an external drive. 500 GB is plenty large enough for macOS, and lots of apps. Better to move some of your user data to another drive.
Do you know what is using up the space on your system disk?
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I second what @gilby101 says.
No, you can’t move Apple’s built in apps because they reside on the sealed system volume in not-so-obvious places or cryptexes.
I run a Mac mini M1 with a “even more measly” 256GB internal drive and have done so quite successfully. Even 256GB is plenty enough and I have a number of apps installed including Microsoft 365 apps (which aren’t tiny) and VMware Fusion. . My Music and Photos libraries, and virtual machines reside on a 1TB external SSD. My user account remains on the system drive, but any space intensive work gets done on the external drive (e.g. XCode and other development work).
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It really depends on the app.
Some, that involve substantial installers (e.g. Microsoft Office), shouldn’t be moved after installation. If the installer gives you the ability to pick a location for the installation, you could try an uninstall/reinstall sequence, but otherwise, leave it in-place.
Others have simply drag/drop installers (e.g. Firefox). You should be able to move these applications to any location and run them from there.
Note, however, that no matter where the app is installed, they may still consume some space on your boot volume (e.g. by putting files somewhere under the /Library/Preferences or /Library/Application Support directories). These may be things like document templates or add-ons and may be large (e.g. Garage Band stores over 550 MB of audio loops and instruments in /Library/Application Support/GarageBand.)
Other apps may store content in some location under your home directory. Once upon a time, you could specify alternate home directory locations as a part of creating user accounts, but this feature seems to have gone away. You can change an account’s home directory once an account has been created, but if you want to try this, only do it for a newly-created user. You should not try to move a home directory to a new location for an existing user, because there will almost certainly be breakage from apps and system services that have recorded locations within your home directory.
If you find your home directory filling up, only move stuff that you’re in control of (e.g. documents) to new locations. Don’t move stuff that the system apps manage (e.g. content under your Library folder).
Of course, if you move content to external storage, you should expect performance to suffer. An external Thunderbolt SSD will probably perform fast enough to not be a problem, but a USB device or a HDD will not perform as fast. Whether this reduced performance is an issue will depend on what you’re doing and your personal preferences.
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Not 100% true that USB SSD devices won’t perform as fast as Thunderbolt. Hosts that implement Thunderbolt 4/USB4 at 40Gbps and a NVMe SSD enclosure that has a newer USB4 controller chipset (such as the OWC Express 1M2 with its ASM2464PD controller) will perform quite nicely. OWC rates the Express 1M2 at 3151MB/sec real world speed. That’s better than their TB3/4 devices.
Ummm… USB 4’s 40 Gbps data rate is Thunderbolt 4. I would expect these devices to perform identically no matter what name the manufacturer prints on the enclosure.
As for comparing OWC’s older with newer products, that’s their implementation of the protocols, not an issue with the protocols themselves.
Note also that I didn’t say USB3’s top speeds (10 or 20 Gbps) are bad. Only that they won’t be as fast as a Thunderbolt (3 or 4) device that is otherwise equivalent.
Agreed. Rather than space requirements in ~/Library, I was thinking of issues with translocation of the app to somewhere in the /private/var/ folder structure. This will happen on the first run of many apps which have been moved. See Don’t run that app where it landed: how translocation can cause crashes – The Eclectic Light Company. And, I don’t fully understand what goes on! But it is a reason to recommend leaving apps in the default locations.
From my reading of the article, translocation should only occur if all of these are true:
- The app has a quarantine flag (meaning it was downloaded, not installed from local media)
- You did not use the Finder to move it from the location where you downloaded/unpacked it
- You are launching it via the Finder
So, if you routinely use the Finder to move apps after you download them (e.g. to /Applications or ~/Applications) before you run them, translocation should not occur.
I also don’t think it will occur if the app is distributed as a disk image and you drag/drop it from that image to some other location (even to your desktop) and don’t run it from the image. Which is how many popular apps (e.g. Firefox and VirtualBox) are distributed.
Understand. But you did make the blanket statement that “USB device… won’t be as fast.” Definitely true for USB 2/3/3.1/3.2 but not for USB 4. I agree that USB 3.x’s top speeds aren’t bad. But USB 4 narrows / eliminates the gaps between USB and TB disk throughput and allows you to get the most out of NVMe SSDs. I’d prefer an external USB 4 enclosure unless I needed a multi-drive solution and use the money I saved for a faster/larger SSD.
I recomend a Thunderbolt drive with a large NVME-disc. My photos, movies and document archive are moved to it.