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I was trying to get around Vemedio's Instacast limitation on storage location by symlinking (ln -s) the Episodes folder in ~Library/Containers/com.vemedio.osx.Instacast/Data/Documents/Instacast to another location on another drive (which is actually internal in my Mac Pro for what it is worth...). I am wondering if Apple's sandboxing is preventing this to work... Once I open Instacast, none of the previously downloaded episodes are marked as available locally and if I try to redownload one, it seems to download the file in the background but never makes it available... Any idea?

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  • what symlink command path are you using for the other drive exactly (anonymize if you must but include important stuff)?
    – Neil Neyman
    Aug 17, 2013 at 5:47
  • ln -s /Volumes/BigOne/Podcasts/Episodes while I am in /Users/kheldar/Library/Containers/com.vemedio.osx.Instacast/Data/Documents/Instacast
    – FrenchKheldar
    Aug 17, 2013 at 12:30
  • Have you tried killing the link and simply creating an alias in finder instead? Some programs only resolve one or the other depending on implementation.
    – Neil Neyman
    Aug 17, 2013 at 17:39
  • After you make the link (but before launching Instacast), does the link work? That is, if you put a text file in the folder, can you see it in both places?
    – TJ Luoma
    Aug 20, 2013 at 23:21
  • Yes the link works I can cd into the link and I can copy things from one to the other. However, Instacast does not see any of the linked files, which tells me it is looking for a specific file ID which I deleted when I changed the folder into a symlink... WHat do you think?
    – FrenchKheldar
    Aug 23, 2013 at 4:40

1 Answer 1

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For some reason, symlinking a part of the folder inside of the Containers folder doesn't work. If you want to symlink, you have to symlink the whole folder, i.e. com.vemedio.osx.Instacast

On OS X versions that support sandboxed apps (beginning from Lion), it's sometimes impossible to symlink a sandboxed app application support files to other partition, at least, an inner portion of the folder structure.

https://gist.github.com/certainlyakey/e6729864ba3fe73f9cc1:

For example, Airmail is a sandboxed email client. I'd like to move its settings and email db to another partition by symlinking it, but it doesn't work with the app if I symlink an inner folder of its library container:

cd ~/Library/Containers/it.bloop.airmail.beta7/Data/Library/Application\ Support/
ln -s /Volumes/doxx/sys/Airmail Airmail

The solution is to symlink the whole container:

cd ~/Library/Containers/
ln -s /Volumes/doxx/sys/Airmail/it.bloop.airmail it.bloop.airmail
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