Moving All The Important Stuff to a New User Account. What to take?

Question

It's been quite an eventful week and, because I can't turn %%$$! FileVault off on my original user account, I've just decided to move over to my back up account. "Brian" now has Admin abilities but I was wondering about the process of getting Brian to look/feel just like my original, now f'ed up account. Is it just about putting the Preferences file folder onto an ext. HD and putting it into the new account's Library? (I've managed to screw things up REAL BAD messing about with my Preferences Folder. I really don't want to go through that again!)
Anyway, anything else beside the above folder? I've got all my music and photos/movies already on the Ext. HD. I'm so mad at the Brianhardy account, I really look forward to deleting it. (No, that doesn't make any sense...)
Finally, how do I pick a better picture for brian for the users window? Nothing against dogs but.......
Thanks.
Brian

Answer 1

Hi Brian
I went through what you are currently describing for the same reason as yours: disabling FileVault. Let me give you a few suggestions.
First of all, what I did is I actually went through all the files in the Preferences folder, to choose the ones I really wanted to move to the new account. There were so many obsolete preference files in there remaining from uninstalled apps that it was worth seriously cleaning up this folder.
Second, the Preferences folder is probably not the only folder in your Library you want to migrate. I'll give you a list of the stuff I migrated, but some of if might not apply to you.
My address book. It was corrupted, so I ended up exporting all the contacts, group by group, and importing them into the fresh, new address book on the new account. But you might not have to go through this trouble.
My calendars. I am a .Mac subscriber, so I synced over .Mac between the two accounts. (Be careful, it is a bit more tricky than it sounds). Same for all the stuff that can be synced (see the .Mac preference pane): Safari bookmarks, email accounts and rules, keychain... For some reason the keychain sync did not work, so I had to do the same export-import procedure as for my address book, except I had to give my password for every item in the keychain... :S I can type my password pretty fast, now :P
/Library/Application Support/iWeb if you use iWeb to create websites, which I don't recommend, after fighting with it for quite a while (but I haven't tried iLife'08 yet). More generally, you should have a look into this Application Support folder to see if anything in there is worth migrating.
/Library/Mail
/Library/Sounds because I had put lots of custom sounds in there that I can use for iCal alarms
/Library/Widgets
By the way, after migrating to this new user, I decided NOT to make it an admin, and to create a second new user with admin rights. I read this makes your mac more secure. Whenever you do something that requires admin rights, you enter the username and password of this admin user.
I also kept the old user for a while, just in case I realize later that there is something I forgot to migrate (which happened a couple of times). I just deleted it a few days ago.
Changing a user's picture can be done in the Accounts preference pane in the System preferences.
Good luck