The Home folder in the Finder location

The Home folder in the Storage Studio location is the Storage Studio folder on your external drive: the place your moved folders, moved apps and offloaded apps live. You can browse all of it. The folders that Storage Studio depends on are read-only in Finder, so a stray drag or delete can't break a moved app. Everything else in Home works like a normal folder.

Which folders are protected

A few more folders that Storage Studio manages are protected in the same way: Containers, Caches, AppCache-Archive, Backups, iOS-Backups, Docker-Data and _pending-delete.

Inside these folders you can browse, open and copy files, but Finder refuses any change: you can't add, edit, rename, move or delete anything there.

Every other folder in Home, such as folders of documents or media you moved there, can be edited normally.

Why they're read-only

A moved app on your Mac is just a shortcut that points to its folder in Apps. If that folder were renamed or deleted in Finder, the app would stop opening, and Storage Studio would no longer know where it went. The same goes for offloaded apps and Storage Studio's own records. Making these folders read-only here means the only way to change them is through Storage Studio, which keeps everything consistent.

%% caption: What you can do with a file in Home, depending on where it is
flowchart TD
  A[A file or folder in Home] --> B{Is it inside a protected folder, or hidden?}
  B -->|Yes| C[Browse, open and copy it. Changes are refused]
  B -->|No| D[Open, edit, rename, move or delete it as usual]
  C --> E[Make changes with Storage Studio instead]

How to change protected things

Use Storage Studio's own tools, which keep your Mac and the drive in step:

• To bring an app back, use Move back or Restore in the Apps window.
• To remove an app, use Uninstall, or Remove on the Offloaded tab. See Uninstalling an app completely.
• To bring a moved folder back, see Moving a folder back.

Good to know

• Home itself can't be renamed or removed from the location, but you can add new files and folders to it.
• This protection is part of the Finder location. If you're on the fallback drive, be careful not to change anything in the folders listed above. See When the location falls back to a mounted drive.
• Home appears once your external drive has been set up for Storage Studio. To hide it from the location, turn off its switch under This Mac on the Mounting tab.

See also: Moving an app to your external drive · Offloading and restoring an app · The shortcut left behind after a move