sharing home folder... will this work?

[rz]

Current machine is a Mac Pro (not MBP), with 1TB boot drive that has a fairly large bootcamp partition running Win 7. The size of my home folder (under Users) is about 100GB, and Applications runs around 40GB. Bootcamp partition is 100GB.

With Lion coming out soon, I thought I'd invest in an SSD. To keep costs down, I'm thinking of getting the 120GB OWC model. I do rely on a few PPC programs under Rosetta, and I always like to keep the previous OS around for a while, just in case I need something that no longer works in the latest OS. So I'd like to do the following:

Keep 1TB drive running SL and Win 7.
Install X.7 on SSD
And the twist: keep my home folder on the 1TB drive, with both X.6 and X.7 pointing to the same home folder.

I know you can move your home folder to another drive... I just want to make sure I can use the same home folder for two different OS's. My gut says it should work, I just want to see if anyone knows for sure, or has actual experience doing this.

[rjmacs]

That sounds like asking for trouble. But i'm just hunching here.

Your home folder generally contains all manner of system preferences in the Library folder that are tied to the user account. I suspect you could get into trouble if the OS was writing/rewriting those files. Perhaps not, but it sounds iffy to me.

[rz]

I just activated One-to-One that my sister got when she got a new iMac. Maybe I'll as a genius when I go for one of my sessions.

[cbelt3]

You *can* chimp down that Home folder quite significantly by moving all your documents and media (and pr0n :biggrin: ) out of it and into another directory structure... on your network, or wherever. Ditto moving apps and such to a network drive. I keep all my media on a network share. It works out pretty well.

[Chakravartin]

You could share the same Home folder between two different versions of the OS and for the most part it would probably work fine, BUT you're going to end up with different versions of some apps for different versions of the operating system and in many cases their preference files will be incompatible between versions and that is going to cause problems.

If you need to free up space on the SSD, you could always keep your documents on a hard drive instead of your whole Home folder.

With a Mac Pro you don't have any need to mess with your current drive for that purpose. Just install another hard drive to host the documents.

...And back all of it up nightly to a nice big external HD.

[rz]

Biggest problem is that I have Logic Pro installed, which takes up a ton of space on the boot drive.