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I have some large files in my home folder which are causing issues with Finder, and I need to store them elsewhere, but as of macOS Catalina, the root filesystem is Read-Only. I've seen some solutions involving using Recovery Mode to modify your root folder's permissions, but is there honestly no-where you're supposed to put stuff outside of ~/ without doing this?

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  • Describe the issues in detail in your original question. You should be able to have files hundreds of GB in size anywhere in your home folder with no issues at all. How do you think putting these files on the Catalina System volume is suddenly going to change the way the underlying file system is going to act? Apr 12, 2020 at 18:05
  • I have several files in the tens of GBs, and folders which contain millions of files within my ~/ dir. Upon speaking to Apple support, we determined that having these large files in there is why Finder is halting when I start it. I didn't really feel that part was relevant though, I just want to put things in a folder outside of my home directory without doing anything too crazy with modifying root permissions via Recovery mode etc.
    – deeBo
    Apr 12, 2020 at 18:08
  • If you have thousands of files in one folder, then that might cause Finder some problem, but that's going to be true wherever that folder is.
    – benwiggy
    Apr 12, 2020 at 18:57
  • On a different test user Finder starts instantly, but it takes upwards of an hour or two for my user. The senior something guy I spoke to from Apple said it's likely because of large files (he suggested VMs) in my user dir. I think it's because Finder walks your user directory for thumbnails or something similar on start, but not the others' user directories, hence it only affects mine.
    – deeBo
    Apr 12, 2020 at 19:00

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One place that Apple recommends/allows is /Users/Shared.

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