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How To Move Applications From One Hard Drive To Another On My iMac ?

I have an iMac with SSD and traditional hard drive. Now the SSD are getting full and I want to move stuff to the traditional hard drive since this i much larger. I have already moved iTunes library.
How can I move applications from the SSD drive to the traditional hard drive ? Eg. I have a photoshop application of about 2,5 gb which would be nice to have on the traditional drive rather than SSD since I don´t use it much.
Should I be careful when moving applications or is it safe ?
Thanks a lot for any input.
—–
Nigel Datta

Comments: 5 Responses to “How To Move Applications From One Hard Drive To Another On My iMac ?”

    12 years ago

    I would recommend against moving applications to an external hard drive. The reason is speed. An external drive, especially a standard USB one, is much slower to access than your internal drive. So launching an app on an external drive, and using it as it accesses other parts of itself, will be slow and in some cases may not work as expected.
    If you want to try it, you could just move it on to the external drive by copying it there, and then running it from there. But Photoshop may be an exception to that since Adobe has very strict installation procedures. Moving it may break it. So you may need to re-install it using the installer and see if there is an option to put it on your other drive.

      Nigel Datta
      12 years ago

      Hi.
      Thanks for the reply.
      I don´t intend to move applications to an external drive. My iMac has both the SSD and "traditional" HDD. So, really I will be moving applications from one location on the computer to another.
      I will leave out moving photoshop.
      Is it still a bad idea to move applications then ?
      Can I move an application only by moving/copy the program to another location ?
      Nigel

        12 years ago

        Ah, I see. If it is an internal drive, then it should be fine. I'd just move most apps to an Applications folder (you create) on that drive. Test them. Then remove them from the SSD once you know they work. For Adobe software, I would reinstall.

    Ethan Rose
    12 years ago

    You could move the folder and then put a symlink where it normally goes.

    You should be ok for tricky installs etc if you do it that way although you may not be able to move the whole folder while the OS is running.

    Nigel Datta
    12 years ago

    Thanks. I will be looking into this.
    Nigel

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