Creating a new user to synch ipod, ipad and iphone?

Question

Hi,
Apologies if this has been covered before. I'm in the middle of moving from the UK to the US. My "real" computer is in transit and I won't have access to it for a few weeks. I'm traveling with an ipad, ipod touch and I've just picked up a us iphone. I'd like to synch everything up, esp the apps between the devices I've brought with me from the UK and the iphone I've just bought.
My partner has his powerbook with him running the latest version of osx. Could I set up a second user account on his machine and synch apps, update locations on the UK devices via itunes on his machine? I don't want to interfere with his existing itunes config, if that makes sense.
Thanks!
Pete

Answer 1

That would be feasible. But understand that iDevice syncing is basically one way - computer to iDevice. Since the new user account is essentially empty, when you sync you will lose most everything on your iDevices, except the iPhone which is already empty.
To avoid this you need to start with your iPhone (nothing to lose) so you can then configure iTunes NOT to automatically sync when a device is connected. Then you need a third-party utility that can be used to transfer the contents of your other iDevices into the iTunes session you are setting up in the new user account. There are a lot of utilities for this such as Pod2Mac, PhoneDisk, etc. Look for them at CNet Downloads or MacUpdate. Use one or more of these utilities to copy the contents of your iDevices to the iTunes account. Once that's done then you won't lose that data when you sync.
One problem with the above is I don't know what you can do about your contacts, calendar, and email. You will need to arrange to get that data transferred as well. If you have a MobileMe account then all that data is on MobileMe so you can sync it to your iDevices via MobileMe.