r/MacOS • u/eerdembeler • 8h ago

Developer Saturday A lifesaver program for whose using external ssd on macs

Actually this isn’t an advertisement it’s a free program. I use an external SSD with my Mac mini M4 because I’m constantly running low on storage space. I kept running into issues when downloading DMG files, as I didn’t want them downloaded to my internal SSD. So, I built a custom program to solve this, and then decided to release it publicly, I’m sure there are plenty of others out there facing the same problem.

This program is EXdl please don’t forget to leave a star!

6 Upvotes

64% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

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u/github-guard 8h ago

🔍 GitHub Guard: Trust Report (Passed)

Here are the safety audit results for the linked repositories:

Repository: erdembeler/exdl

Score: 3/6

  • ❌ Low Star Count (⭐ 1 / 5 required)
  • ❌ New Repository (under 30 days old)
  • ✅ Licensed under MIT
  • ✅ Security Policy Defined
  • ℹ️ Personal Account Repository
  • ✅ Signed Commits

⚠️ Security Reminder: Always verify source code before executing scripts.

1

u/promo-guard 8h ago

🎉 Welcome to Developer Saturday, u/eerdembeler! Your project is now live for the community to check out. Upvote, give feedback, and show some love to your fellow devs! 🚀

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u/hokanst 1h ago edited 52m ago

This is a clever but likely fragile solution, that may break, if the app ever stops working. The same can be achieved without any extra software:

To avoid filling up the internal drive one can simply download apps directly to the external drive.

When "installing" simply drag the app to some "App" folder that you created on the external drive. Apps can (usually) be "installed" anywhere, so there is rarely a need for them to go into the (default) "Applications" folder. Note: if an app really needs to be install in "Applications" this will probably trip up Exld.

The custom "App" folder (on the external drive) can be added to the Finder sidebar & Dock for easy access.

This approach will also play nice with Spotlight / Launchpad and app updates.

The only two benefits/differences that EXdl seems to have is:

  • It makes all apps appear to live in the default "Applications" folder.
  • It gives clear error messages about when certain apps are not available (when the external drive is not connected).

Do note that neither solution deals with app related data that gets stored in the users "Library" folder (located on the internal drive). This can matter, as some apps store a lot of data, in some cases this data can be much larger than the app itself.