UNIX ownership on portable drives

Question

OK, I am having a pretty technical issue. At  #  level in Terminal, I am seeing the user and groups set as "unknown". Even with the power at #, I cannot change these settings using any combo of chown or chgrp that I can think of. Oddly enough, chmod works without a hitch.
Here is my situation, assuming that the OS was using UID or UUID to establish "who was really who" when it deciphers security rights for the user named "Bill" (just using myself as an example), as soon as I set up the new Mac Pro, I imediately went in and changed the UID and UUID to match those on my MacBook Pro. BTW- I have had no problems whatsoever other than I sometimes have to log in as Root to grab a file from an old TM backup...... chown/ chgrp/ and chmod have fixed every one of these issues.
Here is the reason I did this seeming crazy thing.........  I have very specific rights assigned (on the Mac Pro) to my business files and my photography files (which, being a pro who makes a living from these files, I consider my photography to be business files too!). I have full rights (7) my wife can read & execute (5), no one else has any rights at all. When I am on the road, and living off of a portable drive, I want the files I have synced to carry these same rights & limitations. As my UID and UUIDs match between the machines, I really expected the OS to say "OK, this user named Bill, who wants access to this directory, seems to be the same user, so I will let him do what he wants.".................. If groups and owners do not follow, this will never work! I expected a little bit of a challenge when I went to set everything up for the first time but I did not expect that I could not overcome my challenges when at a #!!!!!!!!!
Any ideas from UNIX gurus would be most appreciated! 
Thanks in advance,
Bill
 MacBook Pro (15in Late 2011), Mac OS X (10.8.2), 16GB RAM
 MacBook Pro (15in Late 2008), Mac OS X (10.7.5), 8GB RAM
 Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.4), Dual 3.2GHz Xenons- MANY upgrades
 Mac Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2), Mid-'12, 12-Core, 64GB RAM
 iPad, iOS 5.1.1
 iPad 2, iOS 6
 iPhone 4, iOS 6
 iPhone 4S, iOS 6

Answer 1

etresoft,
I thank you for your tips and I thank you for your advice. We are going to need to "agree to disagree" on a couple of things here. While I will have to agree with your assertions regarding the "tinkering around" of with hidden files/DIRECTORIES is something that should be left alone by almost all users, you have not accounted for the more technical user who has a need to accomplish something specific, with the experience to be cautious and to know that he/she does run the risk of "breaking" something (one of the many needs for backups BTW).
I am NOT blowing my own horn here, this is just something to take into consideration before assuming the person on the other end is an idiot. No, I don't have a lot of points. No, I am not at a "high" level within the support community. No, I do not participate as often as I should, for the benefit of others. However, prior to ever owning my first Mac, I worked with UNIX for nearly 20 years. Mostly AIX, quite a bit of HP-UX, a little SCO, and a little with various flavours of Linux. I have been an AIX server & system (as we added more servers) administrator. Most of the time when I was not using SMIT, I was working from a "#". Now, do I know it all? God no, far from it! Am I "too good" to make mistakes? NO, in fact I have made some awful ones over the years which left no option than to restore from tape backup (or re-install AIX if that would fix the problem faster).
Now, with all of that out of the way, I switched from Windows to Mac for two reasons. #1 is reliability; no big surprise there...... #2 was the heart of that reliability, UNIX, which allowed me to do things Windows could (but OS 9 could not) and so much more. I loved it so much that I ditched all my Windows computers and have never looked back. What I have learned over the years is to be VERY careful; this includes a fresh backup prior to making any significant changes. I have also learned that pretty GUI interface for the OS, tends to work for the UNIX kernel that really runs the show. I have learned that you can take a powerful computer (say, a Mac Pro, for example) and do things on it that the best UNIX servers could only dream of 10 years ago. BTW- I ran all my proposed ideas by an Apple tech support supervisor before I even opened the box on the new workstation. He agreed with my plan on the UID and the UUID, he agreed with how I intended to bring files across from the old Time Machine backups, but he forgot to mention the ownership of files on external drives. I probably should have just tried to find the same supervisor again, but this did get me to dip my toe in the Support Community and try to assist a few others for a change. 
No hard feelings.   This is probably karma somehow because I know I have taken the same line with customers and fellow users many times over the years, only to find that sometimes, they knew even more about the OS than me. In this case, I needed some pretty technical help. While I appreciate the warnings as they do help serve as a reminder as how severe the consequences could be. However, dismissing questions with an attitude of "Mac OS is not intended to work that way" or "you should never need to do that" is the whole reason jokes like "If Computers Were Beer" are created.
I have to agree with you about some of the Adobe products. For photographers, Adobe has been pretty good to us, with Photoshop, for many years, having way more power on a Mac than on a Wintel workstation. They are pretty even now, provided you make sure you go through the hassle of selecting/building a Windows workstation that has all the right "tools" for you to work at a professional level, but you can't go cheap, especially if you work in Adobe RGB and want to see the colours. In short, you might as well get a Mac
Thanks for your advice, maybe we can be of assistance each other at some point in the future. I love learning new things..........  any day I learn something new is a good day!
Bill
 MacBook Pro (15in Late 2011), Mac OS X (10.8.2), 16GB RAM
 MacBook Pro (15in Late 2008), Mac OS X (10.7.5), 8GB RAM
 Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.4), Dual 3.2GHz Xenons- MANY upgrades
 Mac Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2), Mid-'12, 12-Core, 64GB RAM
 iPad, iOS 5.1.1
 iPad 2, iOS 6
 iPhone 4, iOS 6
 iPhone 4S, iOS 6