Hi, I just wanted to let folks know about an issue I'm having with Ventura 13.3 - and to see if maybe anyone has a fix.

For years I've kept my Home directory on an external Thunderbolt SSD. It's all been more or less fine until I upgraded to 13.3 a couple of days ago. When the system restarted, it hung while logging back in to my main user account (stored on the external SSD). I have an admin account with the Home folder on the internal SSD, and that could login just fine. No matter what I tried, I could not get the Mac to startup with my main user account on the external SSD.

Apple recommended I reinstall 13.3 - so I did that, creating new Users, etc.

That allowed me to create a new User for myself and to use the Home directory on the external SSD. All seemed fine.

Except that when I went to the Mac App store, I could not login. It would accept my username and password, but the login dialog box would disappear, allowing me to click "Sign in" again, but never sign me in.

The only way I can get everything to work again is to put my Home folder back on the SSD. When I do that, I can again log in to the Mac App store (and iCloud generally) and everything works fine.

Just wanted to give everyone a head's up and see if maybe someone has found this to be a problem and has a work-around.

foonon said:

I raised a similar concern here:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/users-home-folder-on-external-disk-broken-on-13-3.2385615/

So far, nothing for it except to hack and slash my way back to a functioning system

Thanks, yes, looks like the same issue.

I don't think putting your home folder on an external drive is supported. It might work now, but I wouldn't be surprised if it fully breaks in future macOS updates. I recommend keeping the home folder on the internal drive, and keeping only user data on external devices.

Oh it definitely worked prior to 13.3 and every Mac OS X before that. And the whole point is to keep user data on the SSD - and that's what is supposed to be in the Home folder.

Similar problem. Upgraded from 13.2 to 13.3 and now I can't log into an account whose homedir is on an external drive.

The problem has something to do with ownerships/acls/magic.

1. The external disk is mounted.
2. I can't log in as "Barney" -- an account whose homedir is on the external drive.
3. I can log in to an account "fred" that has its homedir on the internal drive.
4. I can see the other account's home directory from "fred" and the files are owned by "barney"
5. sudo /bin/bash and now the owner shows up as "_unknown" group "_unknown" and the user/group ids are 99

Since the OS doesn't recognize that barney owns his own home directory, I get a never-ending spinning wheel when barney attempts to log in.

This is the pits.

[On M1 mini] I have had the same problem with my home directory on an external drive. I've hacked my way to a partially functional system. In the process I logged out of my iCloud account via "System Settings" but subsequently I am no longer able to login into iCloud. Login over the web to iCloud is still working.

This has cost me a lot of time, aggravation, and inconvenience. I am not a "happy camper" at the moment. This is really making me question Apple's OS release process.

chabig said:

I don't think putting your home folder on an external drive is supported. It might work now, but I wouldn't be surprised if it fully breaks in future macOS updates. I recommend keeping the home folder on the internal drive, and keeping only user data on external devices.

While it might not be supported, it definitely worked. I've been using /Volumes/Users for my home folders since 2009.

I had less trouble migrating from my 2009 Mac Pro.

~f

You can put individual folders within a particular user's directory onto an external drive and link them, but linking the entire user's directory itself was never a supported configuration.

sebfrey said:

the whole point is to keep user data on the SSD - and that's what is supposed to be in the Home folder.

You can do that without moving the entire user folder, either set different paths for libraries like Music, Photos and so on, or move and link these folders that are within your user's directory, like the Downloads folder, to avoid having to change the default downloads folder for multiple apps individually.

I really don't see why you would deliberately move the entire user directory when that always came with a warning that it's not supported and might break the account. When threads come up in forums asking about it I've always seen people advising against it for that reason.

okkibs said:

You can put individual folders within a particular user's directory onto an external drive and link them, but linking the entire user's directory itself was never a supported configuration.

If it wasn't a supported configuration then why was it a feature in "System Settings>User & Groups>[User]>Advanced Options/Home directory"?

okkibs said:

....

I really don't see why you would deliberately move the entire user directory when that always came with a warning that it's not supported and might break the account. When threads come up in forums asking about it I've always seen people advising against it for that reason.

I've never made /Users/foonon a symbolic link to /Volumes/Users/foonon. I've always assumed that symlinks are the problem...

I've changed the home dir field in the passwd entry to refer to /Volumes/Users/foonon.

~f

BigSplash said:

If it wasn't a supported configuration then why was it a feature in "System Settings>User & Groups>[User]>Advanced Options/Home directory"?

I checked this before writing my post and I am still on the latest Monterey as Ventura has some workflow-breaking bugs that prevent upgrading. There is no such advanced options in the system settings, I thought I had seen that before, but it must have been removed at some point. Then perhaps it was a supported configuration in the past, but it certainly hasn't been for a while. I don't have any Mac running something older than Monterey so I don't know when it was removed.

okkibs said:

I checked this before writing my post and I am still on the latest Monterey as Ventura has some workflow-breaking bugs that prevent upgrading. There is no such advanced options in the system settings, I thought I had seen that before, but it must have been removed at some point. Then perhaps it was a supported configuration in the past, but it certainly hasn't been for a while. I don't have any Mac running something older than Monterey so I don't know when it was removed.

Control click on the user's account to get the "Advanced Options". It's been there for a "looong" time.

BigSplash said:

Control click on the user's account to get the "Advanced Options". It's been there for a "looong" time.

Huh, indeed that worked. First line is a warning in red that says changing anything might damage the account and prevent the user from logging in. We seem to have very different definitions of what supported means.

chabig said:

I don't think putting your home folder on an external drive is supported. It might work now, but I wouldn't be surprised if it fully breaks in future macOS updates. I recommend keeping the home folder on the internal drive, and keeping only user data on external devices.

Not that we don’t care what you think, but please support your assertion with a link to the relevant Apple documentation. Home folders on non-local volumes, including network shares, have always been supported. If that has changed with 13.3, where’s the documentation?

Caveat: while you have SIP disabled, you need to login to each user account that has a non-boot-drive home directory (i.e. do steps 5-6-7 for each account).

jlg89 said:

Caveat: while you have SIP disabled, you need to login to each user account that has a non-boot-drive home directory (i.e. do steps 5-6-7 for each account).

Yup! That seems to do the trick!

~f

okkibs said:

You can put individual folders within a particular user's directory onto an external drive and link them, but linking the entire user's directory itself was never a supported configuration.


You can do that without moving the entire user folder, either set different paths for libraries like Music, Photos and so on, or move and link these folders that are within your user's directory, like the Downloads folder, to avoid having to change the default downloads folder for multiple apps individually.

I really don't see why you would deliberately move the entire user directory when that always came with a warning that it's not supported and might break the account. When threads come up in forums asking about it I've always seen people advising against it for that reason.

Click to expand...

Where was the warning? From apple? From random posters?

okkibs said:

You can put individual folders within a particular user's directory onto an external drive and link them, but linking the entire user's directory itself was never a supported configuration.


You can do that without moving the entire user folder, either set different paths for libraries like Music, Photos and so on, or move and link these folders that are within your user's directory, like the Downloads folder, to avoid having to change the default downloads folder for multiple apps individually.

I really don't see why you would deliberately move the entire user directory when that always came with a warning that it's not supported and might break the account. When threads come up in forums asking about it I've always seen people advising against it for that reason.

Click to expand...

ok.. I think there is a bit of cultural misunderstanding here.
For those of us who grew up with Unix/Linux/AIX/IRIX/HPUX/Ultrix we have always moved user home directories away from the system volumes. It is good practice, as it prevents a user from chewing up all the disk space on the system volume. Such mishaps often led to system hangs with mystery logs, broken files, weeping maintainers.

So it was and is natural for us to move user home directories onto another volume. It also allows us some insulation from system-upgrades gone wrong.

Many of us came from grown-up industrial operating systems (AIX/IRIX/HPUX/Ultrix) where this "just worked." I, for one, had never heard anyone from apple caution that it was unsupported. In fact, it "just worked" when I did it several major versions ago. It broke with Ventura 13.3. And it broke in a way that has little to do with logging in.

Disk file ownership is broken for external mounts. As root, do an ls -l for an externally mounted directory. The owner is _unknown and the UID is 99. Now as user Barney do the same thing. The owner is Barney and the UID is Barney's.
Interesting? Now log in as Fred -- the owner is Fred and the UID is Fred's.

Nevermind login support -- Ventura 13.3 screwed up file ownership on external drives.

My guess is that nobody said that file ownership and protection on external drives is unsupported.