Multiple user accounts

[Cassady]

Hello all... Need some help from Mac old-timers...

I've just finished my 40 hour migration, using the Assistant. I'm pleased to say all went well - and everything was transferred without a hitch, right down to my iTunes ratings and apps.

Now for the slight problem. My having bought the MBP overseas, saw me set it up and start using it over there. I downloaded certain apps, documents and photos, off my iPhone whilst over there.

I therefore created a new user account for my MBP. After finishing the migration - I couldn't find the migration files, in spite of my HD space having grown by 220 gigs. At first I thought something had gone wrong, but decided to restart, and check again.

Lightbulb moment.

On rebooting, a new User Account had been added. It was the same as my old laptop - and after logging in, all was where it should be.

I now have 3 user accounts: Guest; Old Laptop user account with all my old/original files; New user account created when I first setup the MBP.

QUESTION: is there any way to merge these accounts? If not - what would be the best way to copy the new files out of the initial account, and into the migrated laptop account? Or should I simply leave things as are - and treat the one account as a "work only" account, and the other as a "home only" account?

Your thought would be greatly appreciated.

 

[koffiejunkie]

This will really depend on which applications are involved. For the iPhoto part, you can copy that iPhoto library to a place where your imported user can read it. I don't have the latest version of iPhoto, so what follows may be slightly different. iPhoto 09 won't let you import a library, but if you open iPhoto, and simply drag/drop the old library from Finder onto iPhoto, it imports it.

You might also be able to burn it to DVD and import from there, but I suspect that will lose any editing you've done.

Downloaded files, ditto. Copy it to somewhere you can access it (say, and external drive) and copy it back from the new user.

 

[bwana]

What version of OsX are you running? I'll double check but iirc if you delete an account you're prompted as to what you want to do with that account data.

 

[Cassady]

Thanks all. It appears I've done what many others have done as well - a quick web search yielded plenty of hits. At first, I was contemplating keeping both user accounts. Set up the quick switching option, to jump between both user accounts on the fly...

Only thing is, my MBP starting freezing between switches. To say I was disappointed at my new Mac doing something I thought only Windows machines were guilty of, would be a huge understatement.

Regardless, the constant crashing has put me off running two user accounts. I'm in the process of copying those new photos over to my "laptop" user account - and will then delete my initial user account.

I hope it's as simple as that. I doubt it will be though, since surely the mac will see the initial user account as being the Admin account, not to be killed off by the second account? We will see.

As for OsX - running whichever version of Lion came just before MLion. Updated 2012 MBP.

 

[Cassady]

[Rant on]

I am not a very happy chappy right now, with all things Mac. Consider this to be a rant, and I'll no doubt feel better in the morning...

At 19h15 this evening, started the process of deleting my initial user account. I had removed pretty much everything, dragged the iPhoto library (23gb) to the trash, and similarly cleaned out the Documents folder.

As mentioned, I was prompted about what I wanted to do with the Home folder of the user account to be deleted - being pedantic (just in case), I opted for the 'save as disc image in the deleted users folder'...

23:41 - back home from dinner, and it's still busy deleting the user? WTF?

I cannot reboot, since I'm told the Systems Preference is still deleting a User, and that I should wait... Honestly, how long can it take to write a disc image of a user account, with virtually no data?

What with all the freezing this afternoon, with my jumping between accounts - and now this, and so far I've been majorly disappointed... It must have been seriously ignorant and unrealistically expectant of me, but I honestly thought that purchasing a new Mac would see these kinds of things as being something of the past... Only it now appears to be more of the same...

[Rant off]

 

[Cassady]

Just googled "how long does it take to delete a user account on a Mac"- and what do you know - many similar queries have been made...

Looks like I'm just too impatient. I'm not going to risk interrupting it - will leave it plugged in overnight, and check in the AM - if it's still busy, then I'll go the force-quit option.

Pretty bummed so far.

But will build a bridge and get over it.

 

[bwana]

Correct me if I'm wrong but you're essentially creating a 220gb disk image and copying all of your files into it. You can't expect that to be instantaneous.

 

[koffiejunkie]

Particularly not if you're copying from and to the same physical disc.

 

[Cassady]

Nope. The initial user profile had virtually no data on it - barring 23gigs of photos, which were deleted prior to the whole removal attempt. The new profile, created from the laptop when I did the migration, was the one I decided to keep, and it had/has the 250gigs of data...

I might be missing something in the above, that would still explain why the profile being deleted might take long (I'll be the first to admit that I'm not all too clear what burning a disk image of the user home file entails) - but never expected this.

Be that as it may - woke up 20 minutes ago - and had a look. Error message received about how it could not successfully write the disc image. Selected the delete option again - this time without saving anything of the user home file, and 5 seconds later, it was done.

So problem appears to be solved. Rebooted and other user profile is gone. I should probably do a disk-scan/fix or something (defrag??), what with all the data shifted around. Any suggestions on what the Mac equivalent is? Would it be worth it to purchase the Mac cleandisk(?) app?

Many thanks all!

 

[kingrob]

Wow....you posted at 03:46! That's hardcore.

Don't you have an external drive that you can copy all the files to & sync it regularly with your notebook?

If I want to format my pc and install a fresh copy, I wipe everything, and then just plug the external drive in and copy everything back.

 

[Cassady]

Wow....you posted at 03:46! That's hardcore.

Don't you have an external drive that you can copy all the files to & sync it regularly with your notebook?

If I want to format my pc and install a fresh copy, I wipe everything, and then just plug the external drive in and copy everything back.

Still working on getting over my jetlag - so not really in synch with SA time yet...

I haven't been having much luck of late - but getting my mail setup successfully this morning, has restored some faith.

I do have an external harddrive - a huge Seagate one. So imagine my surprise when for some or other reason, my MBP didn't want to write to it. I played around with permission settings, since I seem to recall reading somewhere that this might be an issue - but no joy... So I was left with only my 16gig flashdrive - which limited my ability to transfer what I had somewhat...

Regardless - it's been done now - so I'm making do.

 

[kingrob]

Regardless - it's been done now - so I'm making do.

That's the spirit! Go forth and conquer!!

Apparently there's an opening for a Mac Genius at the iStore, V&A Waterfront....thought you should know.

 

[bwana]

Still working on getting over my jetlag - so not really in synch with SA time yet...

I haven't been having much luck of late - but getting my mail setup successfully this morning, has restored some faith.

I do have an external harddrive - a huge Seagate one. So imagine my surprise when for some or other reason, my MBP didn't want to write to it. I played around with permission settings, since I seem to recall reading somewhere that this might be an issue - but no joy... So I was left with only my 16gig flashdrive - which limited my ability to transfer what I had somewhat...

Regardless - it's been done now - so I'm making do.

That drive isn't by any chance formatted as NTFS because while OsX will read it it can't write.

 

[Cassady]

That drive isn't by any chance formatted as NTFS because while OsX will read it it can't write.

It might well be. Thanks for the heads-up - will google it and see what I can work out. If it is, then that's how it will stay. 6 years of family photos means it's not going to be touched!

 

[koffiejunkie]

I'm using the Paragon NTFS drivers. At the time I needed it, the free ntfs-3g/fuse combo from Tuxera hadn't bee ported to Lion yet, so I went with Paragon. I'm very glad I did. Their drivers perform better than the free ones from Tuxera (can't comment on the commercial ones) and they just sent me a free upgrade license for Mountain Lion.

 

[Cassady]

I'm using the Paragon NTFS drivers. At the time I needed it, the free ntfs-3g/fuse combo from Tuxera hadn't bee ported to Lion yet, so I went with Paragon. I'm very glad I did. Their drivers perform better than the free ones from Tuxera (can't comment on the commercial ones) and they just sent me a free upgrade license for Mountain Lion.

Ok. That genius bar job might have to wait for a little bit.

You may as well have written greek above. Will google all of that when I get back - since the ignorant in me seems to think you're suggesting a drive type might make the difference, and that can't be right, can it?? Google here I come (again).


Any suggestions about whether I need to do a disk cleanup or something similar - or is the OsX's in-house systems more than adequate?

 

[koffiejunkie]

...since the ignorant in me seems to think you're suggesting a drive type might make the difference, and that can't be right, can it??

Drive type, no. As long as the connector fits your Mac, the drive should work. The filesystem is just an organisational structure that the operating system uses to store files. Windows uses NTFS (NT File System, NT being the name of branch of windows that 2000, XP, Vista, 7 is based on, as opposed to the 95/98/Millenium strain), Mac uses HFS+, Linux uses one of a couple (ext3/4 usually). FAT16/32 is what Windows 95/98/Mil used and a lot of systems before that, and is the most widely supported. It's stupidly simple, and Windows, Mac and Linux can all read and write to it.

NTFS is a different kettle of fish. It's a complex beast, it's patent encumbered, and unless they're making filesystem tools, most 3rd parties don't bother licensing it. The read-only part of it has been thoroughly reverse-engineered, and is supported by OSX and Linux, but the read/write part isn't. The NTFS-3G attempted this with some success, and two companies came out of it - Tuxera and Paragon. Both provide commercial NTFS drivers for OSX.

Any suggestions about whether I need to do a disk cleanup or something similar - or is the OSX's in-house systems more than adequate?

Nope, leave it to the OS. NTFS, like FAT32 stores files sequentially (maybe newer revisions of NTFS doesn't - not sure), so adding/deleting things always causes fragmentation. Unix-like operating systems (OSX is one) has always spread out files across the length of the filesystem, leaving large chunks of unused space open in-between. This means, there is almost always enough space somewhere to write out a file with all its bits together. OSX does get fragmentation, but except in situations where your drive is very near full, it's generally low enough to be a non-issue.