title: XAMPP MAC OSx - use external USB drive for MySQL storage
body: <p>I'm using fairly large MySQL DB Tables with XAMPP, which makes it tough with my rather small internal storage of my Mac. I thought I would just keep MySQL data on an external USB3.0 SSD drive, but it looks like it's not that easy.</p>
  
  <p>Here is what I've tried:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>With XAMPP ( not VM ): Moved /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/var/mysql to /Volumes/myexternalssd/mysql and then pointed everything in my.cnf to that dir. The permissions seem to have copied properly. But it didn't work. MySQL does not start at all if I trash the original dir, or just keeps using the original dir if I leave it in place.</p></li>
  <li><p>With XAMPP-VM: Moving ~/.bitnami dir to the ext drive and then symlinling ( ln -s ) to the new location. The error is then:</p>
  
  <p>Cannot load stack definitions.</p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Dtails:</p>
  
  <pre><code>1 error occurred:
  
  * failed to create stack: cannot deserialize stack from file "/Users/arseni/.bitnami/stackman/machines/xampp/metadata.json": open /Users/arseni/.bitnami/stackman/machines/xampp/metadata.json: operation not permitted
  </code></pre>