Moving Mac OS X user folders?

Question

Is it possible to move the user folders (not the home folder itself) e.g. documents, photos, music etc to another location e.g. inside my Dropbox on Mac? If so how do I do it? I know I can do this in Windows by changing the target folder for 'My Documents' but being a relative beginner on Mac OS X I am unsure how to do this.

Answer 1

In this case? No. However you can work around it by doing one of the following:

1. Change your Dropbox folder location
   To do so, open up Dropbox's preference and press Move... and choose your home folder. This wouldn't be the option I'd recommend. (It's easier and more possible with Dropbox 0.8.x with selective sync and being able to move your Dropbox folder)

2. Use Symlinks
   You can use symlinks to make it appear as though your Documents, Movies, etc. folders are in the Dropbox folder without actually breaking the file system (and having the folders recreated) that Mac OS X is expecting.

   You'll need to do this in the Terminal but you can run ln -s /Users/YOUR_SHORT_USERNAME/Documents /Users/YOUR_SHORT_USERNAME/Dropbox/Documents replacing the word Documents for whichever folder you need to.

   You can see more about this at Dropbox's wiki

Answer 2

Well, the easiest way I know of is to copy the user folder to the new location, then open System Preferences: Accounts.

Just unlock and 'Ctrl Click' your user account, select Advanced Options and set the new destination.

I'm not aware of any draw backs.

Answer 3

First copy your Documents folder to Dropbox, then open the OS X terminal an do the following:

sudo mv Documents OldDocuments
ln -s /Users/$(whoami)/Dropbox/Documents Documents

After that, you're welcome to delete OldDocuments, though you might need to do:

sudo rm OldDocuments

I am waiting for my Documents to finish syncing to DropBox before I try deleting.