Accessing SketchUp with multiple partitions (Mac)

Situation: You have multiple partitions or hard drives set up on your Mac. After booting into a different partition or drive you're missing your extensions and plugins.

When installing SketchUp on a Mac with multiple drives or partitions, we always recommend installing on your root volume. However this can cause problems when booting into another partition. To resolve this problem we suggest one of these two options:

Option one (recommended): Create a symbolic link. Creating a symbolic link on your secondary volume will allow SketchUp to reference the extensions and plugins on your first volume, and no extra installations are required. Let's say you have HD1 and HD2 and you have installed SketchUp on HD1. To create a symbolic link, follow these steps:

Note: You'll need administrator privileges to make a symbolic link.
  1. Open a Terminal window (in Finder: Applications > Utilities > Terminal).
  2. In your Terminal window, change your directory to HD2 the drive that does not have SketchUp installed. For example, you may need to type cd /HD2.
  3. Within HD2 navigate to /Library/Application Support.

    4. Note: This is not ~/Library/Application Support/

  4. In the Terminal window, type: ln -s /Volumes/HD1/Library/Application\ Support/Google\ SketchUp\ 8/Google SketchUp 8. This will create the symbolic link.
  5. To verify that the symbolic has been created, type: ls -la | more in the Terminal window. You should see a line with the following: SketchUp 8 -> /Volumes/HD1/Library/Application Support/Google SketchUp 8/
  6. Close Terminal and use SketchUp as usual.

Option two: Install SketchUp directly on your second partition. You will have two separate SketchUp installations, which may have different properties. For installation instructions, please visit our installation page.

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