ADVANCED BACKUP AND RESTORING: 102

Question

I use my dual G5 in a recording studio and had two primary purposes: 1) To run Pro Tools. 2) To run Final Cut & Imovie.
It has 3 admin accounts. One for my songs, one for my clients songs and one for my engineers songs... There is priceless data on this machine and this surgery is VERY serious.
The machine is hyper over-sensitive when it comes to Pro Tools. It does not like these multiple accounts and neither do I. I must merge these accounts and transfer the songs to an alternative hard drive.
It is of extreme importance that ALL my application data is merged, from iTunes to Pro Tools to Finale and iMovie.
I need to know exactly the steps I need to take to ensure no data is lost. I would appreciate any help. Thank you.

Answer 1

You Got Pwnd wrote:
...I must merge these accounts...
You might want to make a backup of the entire hard drive to an external before you do anything. Then make another one and ship it to a friend out of state that doesn't live in Tornado alley or on a fault line, maybe in a salt mine with a low water table.
Once you have a backup of everything, then you can start to play around with moving files to merge the important data into a single account. One way to share files from one User account to another User account is to use the Public folder. Files inside the Public folder will be visible to the other Users. Decide which account you want to be the destination for the merged data, copy all the other User files to each one's Public folder, then copy all the User's Public files to the new combined merged account. If you have the disc space, make a copy of the files into the Public folder rather than moving the files, you may need to reimport the songs in the merged iTunes library. Does that approach make sense to you? If you need help, maybe find a local Apple Store Genius, a Mac User Group or local shop that will actually walk you through the process and help, if it's that important don't risk trying something yourself that you don't fully understand what you are doing, get help.
To make a total backup you can use Disc Utility's restore function, or other third-party apps like Carbon Copy Cloner, Super Duper, Deja Vu, Data Backup, you might get some Mac backup software bundled with the purchase of an external drive from a Mac-friendly vendor like Other World Computing. Once the backup is finished, run it again, there might have been some read/write errors and a file might have been missed. The third-pary apps will check for existing files and only copy over missing files. Make sure you didn't get any errors, you can check the system.log using /Applications/Utilities/Console for any potential disc error messages.