Transferring Files/Prefs to a New User Account
- From: Vik Rubenfeld <vikr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2008 18:05:55 -0800
I just had to transfer all my files and prefs to a new user account on
the same Mac. It's a lot of work, but in case anyone else needs to do
this sometime, I thought I'd post how I did it.
First, I should mention why I had to do this at all. The reason is that
my new iPhone couldn't sync calendar events. Apple tech support really
tried to help, but in the end they concluded that there was some kind of
corruption in my user account, and I needed to start a whole new user
account if I wanted to sync calendar events with the iPhone.
I started by cloning my hard drive to an external drive using Carbon
Copy Cloner. Then I made all my changes to the external drive, and
booted from it to see if everything was okay. I didn't touch my internal
drive, in case things went wrong and the updated drive got corrupted or
files got lost.
I created a new user account on the external drive, and started copying
files to it using the advice from a site called procata -
http://tinyurl.com/2xjwqj.
I was very careful when copying anything from the following folders:
~/Library
~/Library/Preferences
~/Library/Application Support
The reason I was careful is because, the first time I tried it, I wasn't
so careful, and the same corruption turned up in the new user account -
it couldn't sync to the iPhone either. So I wiped the drive with Disk
Utility and started over.
The second time, I was very careful to copy only the bare minimum of
files from those Library folders - only the files that I was sure had
nothing to do with iTunes or iCal, and which were for specific apps I
also use, like MS Word, etc.
To copy my Mail.app files, I copied:
~/Library/Mail
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.searchhistory.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist
I booted the updated drive and found out that all kinds of permissions
were wrong. All the copied files were owned by the old user account. I
tried setting the permissions for the top level folder to the new user
account and using the action, "apply to enclosed items", in the Finder's
Get Info window, but that a) took forever and b) didn't work. I don't
know if it's a bug or a feature, but it didn't copy the new owner to the
enclosed folders and files.
To fix the permissions, I used the utility BatChmod. It's great. It took
care of it.
When copying my 100,000+ mail files to the new mail account, the Finder
copied 10 or 20,000 and then quit, saying "the file such-and-such could
not be read or written." Why it quit the whole copy operation just
because one file couldn't be written or read, may again be either a bug
or a feature, but it didn't work.
To fix this, I used the utility "File Synchronization," to sync the
contents of the old and new folders. It did a great job.
To copy iTunes music, I copied the folder ~/Music.
And, it worked. I'm running off the updated external drive now, and I
can sync calendar events to my iPhone. If everything seems okay and I'm
not missing any files, after a week or so I'll probably clone this drive
back to the internal drive.
Now I'm going to save this post to the hard drive in case I ever need to
do this again. :)
.
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