Duplicate User Accounts on 1 Mac

Question

My wife has an account on our iMac that she uses for personal and work. We want to DUPLICATE here user account information and delete the work email accounts from her personal user account and remove her personal email accounts from the newly duplicated work user account.
How can I do this? thanks

Answer 1

To duplicate all the stuff in her existing account, I would, as an admin user, first go into system preferences and create a new user account.
Next, from the admin account, I would launch Terminal.app and type
sudo cp -vR /Users/{shortUserNameOfExistingAcc't}/* /Users/{shortUserNameOfNewAcc't}
substituting the appropriate actual short user names for the stuff in (and including) the curly brackets. This should duplicate all her existing stuff into the new account. You can get the short user names by doing
ls -l /Users. This may take a while to copy everything. Then do
sudo ls -lR /Users/{shortUserNameOfNewAcc't}
just to make sure that the newly copied files have the same owner and group affiliations as the new account does -- they should but it's best to check.
Now, for mail accounts, you should have exact duplicates of everything in each user account, so you should be able to log into each computer account separately and remove the undesired mail account from within Mail's preferences. However, should you decide to retain the ability to check any mail account from either computer account, if any of the accounts are POP, just select "Leave messages on server" in Mail's preferences for the "foreign" mail account (i.e., personal mail on work account, or work mail on personal account).
This should work okay for you but as always, one should be cautious and make sure that everything has in fact been duplicated, everything can be opened, read, written, executed, in the new account before deleting the corresponding originals out of the old account.
2001 Quicksilver G4 (M8360LL/A)   Mac OS X (10.4.9)  
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