MacOSX: Create a new user, move safest bits over from my old user?

January 2, 2013 8:47 AM

MacbookProFilter: I migrated my old user onto my new macbook, and carried with it a bunch of problems (slow startup, rapid battery life loss, etc.). Is there a clever, systematic way to migrate chunks of my user account to a new user?

I don't exactly need to find the culprit(s) that are causing all the issues; I just want a machine that works well, but I'd rather not just delete all my preferences and passwords and start over from scratch completely if it's not necessary. Is there some app or guide that shows precisely which parts of a user account are 99% safe to migrate?

posted by sdis to computers & internet (3 answers total)

I dont know about password/preferences, but if you just grab the user folder for the old mac and transfer it to the new one, 99% of all your files will be in the one folder and completely safe to move. Just create a new user on the new computer with the same name as the old user and then over write the home folder on the new computer with the one from the old computer.
posted by KeSetAffinityThread at 10:12 AM on January 2

I'm already on my new computer, using my old user folder. Something in that user folder is slowing down my machine, so I'm looking for a way to create a clean, new user without the problems and with most of my preferences.
posted by sdis at 10:25 AM on January 2

Passwords you can move easily (for the most part) by migrating over your keychain file. Provided you set the new, blank user account to have exactly the same password as you had previously, this shouldn't cause any issues.

As for preferences, what kind of apps are we talking about? It may well be easier to either:

- selectively move preference files (usually located, for the record, either in '~/Library/Preferences' or '/Library/Preferences' in the root of your HD), or
- fly through your installed apps and tweak them by hand.

Do you have any applications with particularly complicated setups? Apart from a handful of apps with complicated settings/UIs like Photoshop, you can probably go for the latter option, which would tend to provide the cleanest method. Even if you have quite a substantial number of apps, this is likely to be significantly quicker than going through hundreds of preference files by hand to decide what is and isn't important.
posted by jaffacakerhubarb at 10:40 AM on January 2