Duane Conder: Whitepaper: Adobe Said No, So I Symlinked Anyway

When Adobe Decides Your Startup Drive Is Its Playground
Sometimes it’s not the crash that breaks you; it’s the slow, invisible clog you didn’t see coming.

It started like most tech spirals do: something was acting weird, I didn’t know why, and everything I tried only made it worse.

The problem was two-fold: first, a macOS bug with APFS-formatted drives that falsely reports used space even after purgeable files are deleted. Second, Adobe’s latest update forces cache files onto the internal NVMe startup drive, which, of course, is also formatted APFS by Apple.

Here’s what actually happened: the Conformed Media Caches had been set to my 32TB Thunderbay RAID, which had been formatted APFS. Because of the bug, macOS reported that the array was completely full, even though it only had 6.36TB on it. When I tried to move the caches to another SSD as I had done for years prior, that’s when it became clear: I couldn’t. The system wouldn’t let me without an error message that stated that this was not doable. So I reformatted the older cache drive (8TB Cache RAID) back to good ol’ HFS+, then ran the code hack I’m about to lay out. But until I could do that, the cache had no choice but to land on the startup NVMe. The one you can’t reformat. The one that fills up faster than a grey tick on an old country dog.

Changing the location of the cache files: that used to be something we little people could change. Not anymore. Adobe’s latest update took that option away, unless you’ve got a second internal SSD or NVMe hardwired into your system. And if you don’t? Tough luck.

So why would Adobe do this?
Simple: performance. They want After Effects to run like a cheetah, and your internal NVMe SSD is fast. Crazy fast. Way faster than even your Thunderbolt-connected SSDs or NVMes. I imagine people kept complaining about playback stutter and slow timelines, so Adobe made a choice: force the cache onto the startup drive.

The problem? They overcorrected 🐞 They didn’t consider Apple’s little AFPS bug.

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What Changed — and Why It Hurts
Used to be, you could set the Conformed Media Cache and Media Cache Files to an external SSD or RAID. Now?

• Good news: The Disk Cache still works on an attached drive.

• Bad news: The Conformed Media Caches offer menus, but they won’t accept your external drive unless it’s flagged as non-removable. And if you have it connected with a cable of any sort, it is removable. This goes for external NVMes: you connect with a cable, it’s removable according to Adobe, and that’s bad now.

And here’s where it gets extra messy. That bug, probably macOS-specific, the one that causes APFS-formatted drives to report incorrect storage after you delete purgeable files. So even if you clear out the cache manually, your system still thinks it’s full. I used to just nuke the external cache drive every few months by reformatting, but you can’t exactly do that to your internal startup drive.

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What Happens When Your Startup Drive Fills Up?

You try to save a file: fail
Your creative apps freeze or won’t launch
Safari and Chrome get sluggish
Emails won’t send
Text messages stall or disappear

Once your Mac turns into a very expensive paperweight, the panic sets in. I’ve already dealt with a few tech calls from panicked clients about this.

But after a couple of hours of frustration, I figured out a workaround. It tricks AE into thinking it’s writing to the internal drive while silently routing the junk somewhere else. It’s similar to using alias folders, but those don’t work. Adobe “sees” the alias and just creates a new cache folder anyway. With the help of GPT, I stumbled onto this bit of skullduggery that actually works.

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Here’s how to pull it off:

Step 1: Know Where Adobe Stores Its Junk (macOS)
These are the default folders where AE dumps its cache:

~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Media Cache/
~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Media Cache Files/

You can delete their contents, but if your drive is formatted as APFS, macOS will most likely still think they’re there. That’s the bug we’re working around in addition to putting the cache on an external volume that can be nuked if need be.

Step 2: Create a New Cache Folder on Your External Drive

Open Terminal and paste:

mkdir "/Volumes/8TB Cache RAID/Adobe Cache"

My cache drive is called 8TB Cache RAID; at that place in the code above, use your drive name. That’s your fresh space on the external drive where all the Adobe junk will live from now on. I use an OWC 4-slot ThunderBay SSD RAID, formatted now as HFS+ (Mac OS Extended, Journaled) using SoftRAID. This avoids the AFPS bug altogether.

Step 3: Clear Out the Old Stuff
Still in Terminal, run:

rm -rf "~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Media Cache*"

Step 4: Create the Symlinks

This is the key step. You’re going to reroute AE’s cache to the new folder
using symbolic links.

Run these two commands: (copy/paste all into Terminal)

ln -s "/Volumes/8TB Cache RAID/Adobe Cache" "~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Media Cache"
ln -s "/Volumes/8TB Cache RAID/Adobe Cache" "~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Media Cache Files"

[Remember to replace 8TB Cache RAID with the name of your external SSD.
This tells AE to write to its usual location, but you’re secretly redirecting the data elsewhere.]

Step 5: Save It as a Script (Optional, but Smart)
You can turn all of this into a .command file you can double-click anytime AE updates and resets things.

Create a plain text file and paste this in:

#!/bin/bash
rm -rf "~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Media Cache"
rm -rf "~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Media Cache Files"
ln -s "/Volumes/8TB Cache RAID/Adobe Cache" "~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Media Cache"
ln -s "/Volumes/8TB Cache RAID/Adobe Cache" "~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Media Cache Files"

[Again: 8TB Cache RAID is changed to whatever your external volume is named.]

Save the file as:

move_adobe_cache.command

Then in Terminal, make it executable:

chmod +x move_adobe_cache.command

Now you’ve got a one-click solution any time Adobe gets cute and tries to reset your cache locations.

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Tips & Gotchas

• Check “Ignore ownership” on your external drive (right-click > Get Info).
• AE updates may blow away your symlinks, so keep that script handy.
• You don’t have to run this daily, just when things stop behaving.

Windows Users?
This post is focused on macOS, especially APFS-formatted internal drives. Windows users might not have this exact issue, but if you’re seeing something similar, this symlink trick could still help.

Final Word
This workaround saved my sanity. AE runs smoothly. My startup drive is clean. And I got back a few terabytes (literally 24TB on the external SSD array) I thought I’d lost.

It’s not magic. Just a little trickery. But in this case? Totally worth it.

Got your own hack? Or a better way? Let me know. I’m all ears, and always open to fewer cache headaches.