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April 18, 2005
Portable Home
This is kind of techie, but I wanted to point out something cool about the fact that Macs have Unix under the hood.
I needed to bring my laptop in for a minor repair. I backed up my home directory to a fire wire drive. A home directory is a Unix concept that Mac OS X has embraced. Then on my iMac I just symlinked the backup copy of my laptop home directory in place of my home directory on my iMac:
cd /Users mv lolife lolife.old ln -s /Volumes/bd1/Mike/lolife .
As a result, when I logged into my iMac I instantly had all my mail, all my bookmarks, all my preferences for all my applications, all my documents, etc. It was as if I was logged in on my laptop. Symlinks are a Unix trick that we Unix geeks are very familiar with. What I thought was cool was how useful it is when combined with a desktop environment like Mac OS X. I don't know if there is an equivalent concept on Windows. I suspect there is.
Posted by Michael at April 18, 2005 02:30 PM