getting help for my "unsupported risky" Configuration elsewhere in the Googlecommunity
as this community here is not the right place for "unsupported risky" configurations, pls follow the link to help other people with the same Problem. up2you and by YOUR OWN RISK!
[Link Edited by Moderator]
Documenting my own solution here, but would be happy to hear whether others have
tried this in different ways. There are just a few steps to consider.
1. Create a dummy user with admin permissions with home directory on the built-
in /Users disk
2. Name your external volume to something, e.g. Home - it would normally then be
mounted on /Volumes/Home
3. Find the Volume UUID for your external disk using diskutil list /Volumes/Home,
let's say the UUID is XYZ
4. Now comes the magic, use the sudo vifs command to add a line to your (by
default empty) fstab file, the line should look like this:
5. UUID=XYZ /Users hfs rw 0 2
Finally, reboot your machine and you are good to go.
Caveat 1: if your external disk is missing or broken you will not have home directories, so
do make a backup!
Caveat 2: if your external disk is missing and you do not have a dummy user (step 1
above) you will not be able to log in at all.
After this you may want to restore a time machine backup. However, Migration Assistant
tries to outsmart you and checks the amount of available space for the root directory
(which is small) rather than the externally mounted /Users directory. To circumvent this
you have to use a two-step process:
5. Restore user details (accounts) but not their data by de-selecting all the data
directories when restoring using Migration Assistant, after doing this you will
have re-created users without most of their data files.
6. Using the command line tool tmutil you can restore without the check:
tmutil restore
/Volumes/Backup/Backups.backupdb/PreviousMachine/PreviousDisk/Users/{joe,anne}
/Users
(please run man tmutil before trying this and use the correct directory names).
Your mount solution works, but I prefer a different setup leaving /Users and
/Users/Shared on the boot volume. You can point an existing account at the mounted
home folder easily:
* Change the name of your macOS user account and home folder - Apple Support
* Account on external HD
This way you can still have a local admin account to run updates and install software that
don't follow the rules of not assuming a user folder is on the same volume as the system
with a local admin account. Your method will break harder in these cases. Apple allows
(and designed updates) to have only one off accounts not in the boot drive /Users as
opposed to over mounting it entirely.
