

Ask HN: What's the best way to separate work and personal projects on a Mac? - saadatq

I&#x27;ve started using my &quot;work&quot; MacBook Pro for passion &#x2F;side projects (really don&#x27;t want to carry two laptops around), and I&#x27;m just curious if any developers have advice for how to separate work&#x2F;fun projects.<p>Do you just create a separate account on the Mac?
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mod
Do you own the machine? If not, I wouldn't build any personal projects on them
unless you don't mind your company owning them.

On my machine (which I own), I just keep them in different folders. I tend to
use the same environments for work and side projects.

What problems are you having keeping them separate?

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mholt
Macbook Pros are powerful - working in virtual machines is usually a good
experience, given the right virtualization software (i.e. you can do better
than VirtualBox). Using a VM for work or personal, and the host machine for
the other, has been sufficient for me in most cases. As for which one you put
in a VM, that depends on the nature of your work compared to that of your
personal projects.

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yen223
To add to this: If you're comfortable with command-line utilities, Vagrant is
amazing for VM management.

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saadatq
Thanks! Using Vagrant already.

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rahimnathwani
How about dual-booting? A Macbook Pro will boot from an SD card or USB 3.0.
You can happily run OS X from an SSD in a USB 3.0 enclosure. Just hold down
the 'option' key during power-up.

As others have said, you could use virtualisation software. However, this will
only work if you're happy installing that on your regular hard drive, and if
you don't need hardware-accelerated graphics in an OS X guest.

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mzjs
What's wrong with seperate accounts? Provides the right level of easily
switching between projects vs. too hard to switch when distracted.

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mijndert
> Do you just create a separate account on the Mac?

Yes. It's the easiest option and you can always remove the personal account if
work doesn't allow it.

