Transferring from old Mac to new Mac

Question

Have just purchased an iMac and have transferred data from an old iMac and MacBook Pro so I now have two accounts on my new computer. Can I merge the two accounts and if so, how? Can I have both accounts open at the same time? Preference is to merge in to one.
Adam Birchall

Answer 1

Sounds like you are doing fine. However, there is a bit of a difference between what you describe and what the original topic poster wanted to do. The original question was about how to merge two accounts that are already on the new computer into one account. That's why I suggested using the Shared folder. Your question is about how to transfer from an external drive (the Time Machine backup) to your new MacBook's internal drive; that's different, and you do not need to use the Shared folder. You should be able to transfer the files directly from the external drive to the appropriate location on in your +user home folder+, not the Shared folder.
Also, if you don't want to do it manually using Finder, there is a utility called Migration Assistant, in Applications/Utilities. You can use it to transfer user data from a Time Machine backup drive to your new Mac. Personally, I do it manually using Finder, because I have more control over what gets transferred (and how it is done), but Migration Assistant is certainly convenient. You can post back if you have questions about it.
You CAN copy your data into the Shared folder, and that would make the data accessible to more than one user account on your MacBook. However, if you are the only user, there is no need to use the Shared folder; just copy the files directly from the external drive to the internal drive, into your +user home folder+ (the house icon in the Finder window sidebar).
you mentioned that some files (particularly music files) won't automatically pop up into iTunes
Again, the original topic poster was trying to merge data from two accounts into one account. In that case, you have to pick one account as the master and add the data from the other account to it. That makes it hard to preserve things like iTunes playlists, rating, etc. from the account that is NOT the master account. You can add music easily by dragging and dropping the music files to the iTunes window, but that just adds the songs to the library; it does not preserve supporting data such as ratings, playlists, play count, etc.
In your case, it should be easier. Here's how to do it for iTunes. On the MacBook, quit iTunes if it is running. Open a Finder window to
<user home folder>/Music/
In that folder, there is a folder called iTunes. If you use the default settings for iTunes, that folder has all the data iTunes uses. So what you need to do is copy the iTunes folder from the old Mac to take the place of the iTunes folder on the new Mac. For this to work, on the old iMac, iTunes must also have kept all of its data in the iTunes folder (you can post back if it was set up differently on the old Mac). After replacing the existing iTunes folder with the iTunes folder from the old Mac, when you run iTunes on the new Mac, it will use the data from the iTunes folder you copied over from the old Mac, and iTunes should look like it did on the old Mac. The only concern is that the old Mac was pretty old, so it may have used an older version of iTunes, not the current iTunes 9. However, I think iTunes will convert the data as needed, when it runs for the first time with the data, so it should be OK.
I kind of summarized how to do it instead of writing the steps in detail, so if you have any questions, you can post back.