How can I set up folder structure and permissions on an external SSD for multiple users with home folders on an internal drive?

Trying to secure each user's folders on an external drive (the way a user home folder is secured) from other user access will get pretty complicated via permission setting.

Here's what I did for a modicum of separation between two accounts on an external drive:

In wife's user account, I set up a top-level folder on the external drive called, let's say, "Martha Files." I then put an Alias to this folder on her desktop. I also put an Alias to her User Home Folder folder on her desktop. I then set Finder preferences to NOT SHOW hard disks or external disks on the desktop. That way, she is guided to either her Home folder or her Martha Files folder and she can manage her own folders & files in each.

You could then also create folders called Documents, Downloads, Music, Movies, Pictures in the "Martha Files" folder, essentially replicating the structure of the user home folder. With some adjustments to settings in the relevant apps, you could then have nearly all data stored on the external drive, not the internal drive.

You could do something similar by creating a Volume for each user on the external drive. In some ways that seems to make better sense to me ... but I haven't done that yet.

That works fine as long as you do not want to use AI which does not work with external drives.

tbirdvet wrote:

That works fine as long as you do not want to use AI which does not work with external drives.

Oh. Gosh.

I’d probably switch to booting macOS directly from the external, then use the /Users/Shared and the rest of the existing support there. That’l be less effort to configure, manage, snd explain.