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Is it possible to (easily) have my computer store cache files on a usb stick, and if so, how?

Aidan Tung
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    What problem are you trying to solve doing this? There's probably a more productive solution to that issue instead of moving your caches to a USB drive. – grg Jul 20 '21 at 21:59
  • USB 'stick' drives are often very slow, compared to internal SSDs or larger (shaped) external drives. This may have terrible consequences for system performance. – benwiggy Jul 21 '21 at 07:03

1 Answers1

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You can create a symbolic link from the Caches directory to your USB drive.

  1. Move your Caches to your USB APFS volume or remove the folder.

  2. Create a symbolic link from Caches in your home directory's Library to the location you moved your caches to.

    ln -s ~/Library/Caches /Volumes/usbname/Caches

    How can I create a symbolic link in Terminal?

You will need to ensure the name of the USB drive does not change and you do not turn on your Mac without the drive connected. Be prepared to experience slowness as the speed of the USB drive will almost certainly be much slower than the internal SSD speed.

grg
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  • If I were to try and change it back, how would I do that? – Aidan Tung Jul 20 '21 at 23:15
  • @AidanTung Remove the link and create the folder again. In both cases I would close all applications before, to make sure they don't access cached data while you move the cache. – nohillside Jul 21 '21 at 05:43