HELP! Deleted iPhoto and iTunes Libraries by changing name?!?!?

[ammonihah99]

Hey guys,

My friend had two user accounts on his Mac. One was "Chris" and one was "Katie". The only one that was ever used was "Chris". Since his wife used the Mac a lot more than he did he thought it would be funny to change the user name from "Chris" to "Katie's Big Mac". The short name was not changed at all. He then deleted "Katie". I guess that deleted all the iPhoto and iTunes Libraries. But that was it.

Does any one know why it did this? I told her to look under Users: Chris: Music: iTunes: iTunes Music: and all of the old files were there. She dragged one of the files over and dropped it in iTunes to copy it over and then she went back to get more and they all disappeared from the folder iTunes Music. I didn't tell her to do this she did it on her own.

The iPhoto Library is totally empty though. Does anyone know why this happened and how to fix it?

Thanks in advance.

Ammon

 

[SilentPanda]

I'm really not getting what you're saying but...

I believe when you delete an account if you go to:

/Users

There is a deleted accounts folder or something like that... at least... there used to be a couple of 10.x.y's back...

If that helps.

 

[yippy]

The big question is, did he do this from system preferences or from Finder? If from finder he could have done a lot of damage and might be SOL. But if from system preferences then they should still be there somewhere.

Of note, deleting Katie should only have deleted things in her user folder. So unless he had some odd setup sharing the iTunes and iPhoto libraries it should NOT have deleted the libraries.

 

[ammonihah99]

He did it in System Prefs. And I'll see if Deleted Users is there. I remember seeign it too.

The problem is that absolutely nothing should be under "Katie" all the music was under "Chris" but when he changed the name for some freak reason all the music and photos were deleted.

Do you think it has something to do with the apostrophe in "Katie's"? My mom was used to putting asterisks in front of her important files in System 9 and when OS X rolled around all her files were deleted.

Ammon

 

[VanNess]

A couple of Apple support articles here and here about this

 

[mj_1903]

When you talk about dragging the songs to iTunes and the songs disappearing, it sounds very much like iTunes has simply moved the songs to the default location which is ~/Music/iTunes.

I'm sure all the files are still there, the OS has no reason to delete them, it's probably just a case of moving them around.

 

[ammonihah99]

Okay it's fixed now. All he did was change the old names back to the way they were, recreate "Katie", and it all came back. He had to reload the libraries for iPhoto and iTunes but that was it. All other prefs are fine. But the weird part is that now the files that were in Chris are now in Katie. Thanks for your help.

Ammon