Updates to Files On-Demand on macOS

Liz_Atems_elisatems We force encryption on all external drives except thumb drives, and we're moving toward that as well. That forces a user to sign into removable drives, and may set them as the owner as well—I've never looked at the mechanics of file ownership in Windows, and forcing encryption accomplishes much the same thing. I can tell my machine to remember the encryption passwords for drives that don't travel, so I don't have to sign into them every time I reboot.

I suspect the reason Apple sets Ignore Ownership by default on external drives is that oftentimes those are removable or the drives travel, and setting the owner would make it a pain to use USB drives to transfer data. For drives that live in one place, I agree setting the owner is much more secure. As to AFP not syncing, I haven't had that problem with other sync services, at least none that use their own sync frameworks.

I'm sure I could figure it out, but I'm feeling a bit lazy. 😏 How did you set your user folder to be on an external drive? I've used symlinks to make external folders appear in another spot in the directory tree (specifically, for the Apple Configurator issue I mentioned above), but I've never relocated a home folder.

Emanuele_Barone I checked the two Macs I have running Ventura and Dropbox, and neither appears to have moved to AFP—at least, the Dropbox folder still shows up in the regular folder location, not as a location in itself. Not sure what's up with that. I'm still copying all my files to local folders, after which I'll need to decide which ones I want to keep on cloud services and which ones I want to leave local. For a lot of files, I'm more interested in Time Machine and Carbonite backup than I am in cloud availability—I already keep my photo library on its own drive, because those are all available in the cloud via my Lightroom account. I also keep my music library in its own root level folder, because there are other ways to access that, and it would be counterproductive to clog up OneDrive with those files.