Hard drive getting full- can I run apps from an external NVME drive?

[chrisdb]

I have a Mac Mini (M1, 2020-Monterey V12.6) with basic 251GB flash storage and two NVME external drives- a 1TB and a 2TB that is used for Time Machine as well as storage.
The internal Flash drive is nearly full and i'd like to move as much as possible from the internal flash drive to the external NVME drives. What is the best way to move an app and it's associated data to an external drive.

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello and welcome.

Most applications will need to be installed and run from the internal storage due to macOS security, the way application support files are installed, and how the update mechanism works.

I would move any large files/folders of you data like music/video/documents to the external to leave the internal storage for macOS and applications.

What kinds of applications are you looking to install/run?

Hope that helps!

C

 

[chrisdb]

Thanks for responding-
I think I have things sorted out now. A check on my internal hard drive using Onyx indicated a problem on that drive. I did a disc repair using the Apple disc utility, deleted some bad files and then upgraded to Ventura 13.0.1.
That gave me a little more space. The next thing I did was a reinstall of Apple Logic Pro that gave me the option to move my instrument library off to an external drive and that made a huge improvement. My main drive is less than half full now.
I still have questions about how/why 74.37GB of "System Data" is occupying more space than my OS and all applications combined, but at least for now I have a reasonable amount of free space on my main drive.