I received a refurbished MBA today. I have my original files on Time Machine from my first computer with 2 accounts/profiles/users. I want to make migration of those files easy, but change the name of one of the profiles on the MBA.Things I should know?

Question

I have not set up the New-to-me MBA yet.

Answer 1

Thanks so much for that article, however, I think that article is more confusing, since it says that there are 2 names, and then throughout the article refers to at least 4, and I am not 100% sure that was what I am after... So, maybe I am not asking correctly....  let me give more details here..
I had a late 2008 Macbook with 2 "profiles" (work/home) (not sure which 'names' these would be) that was consistently backed up to an external HDD via Time Machine through my wifi network at home.  I had upgraded the OS to Mavericks and the "Latest" backup was backed up in Mavericks.  This computer was stolen a couple weeks back. I have now purchaed an Apple refurbished macbook air and received it recently and have not even taken it out of the packaging.  I assume that it is running Mavericks, but don't know that for sure.  Thus, I have not created any new accounts on the new device yet.  I want to migrate my backed up files from the external HDD and re-establish 2 'profiles', however, one of the "names" I'd like to change for the new machine.  So part of my issue is not knowing what the differences are between, "short names", "display names", "user account names", "profile names", and "home directory names".  I know that some of these refer to the same thing, but I am unsure which is which.
What I remember about my old machine was this...  When I looked at the Users folder, there were three folders listed within it, "Shared", "work-name", "home-name".  I assume these are what's refered to as "home directory names" since they were all lowercase, all one word.  When I turned on the computer, the "profiles" that showed up for login had different words than these listed, let's say, "work" and "home".
What I want is for the "work" profile and "work-name" directory to stay the same, and the "home" profile name to stay the same while the "home-name" directory name changes to something else.
I've read many posts now, and haven't found the clear cut example of what I am attempting to do.  Some say to create a dummy admin account on the new machine, use Migration Assistance to bring the backed-up files over to the new-to-me MBA, with the two profile names as they existed.  In the dummy admin account somehow make changes to the one account I want to change, and then after restart, remove the dummy admin account.  I found numerous posts indicating that this may result in permissions problems, which I do not want to have to debug.  I'm a decent computer geek, but not a full on superuser.
Other options I've read indicate to plug the external HDD directly into the new machine at first start up and use the Setup Assistant and transfer the info that way.  Again however, I then have the issue of one of the names, I'd like changed.
While typing this I found.....
Each user in Mac OS X has a full "Name" and a "Short Name" as defined in the Users pane of System Preferences. The short name can contain up to 255 lowercase characters with no spaces. This is the name used to create a user's home directory (also known as the user's Home or Home folder) in the Users folder. 
This is from ealier versions of the OS, so I am not even sure if this is Mavericks friendly or not.