Manual Migration: Use Same Login as Before?

[danqi]

I am in the process of upgrading my Mac Pro from Snow Leopard to Mavericks. I will do this by performing a clean install on a new drive and then manually moving over all important data (documents, pictures, iTunes data, Mail data, certain preferences and application support files, etc.).

What I am wondering is whether I should set up the admin user account (I only use one account) on the new Mavericks system with the exact same name and password as on the old system. The idea behind this is that
A: I won't get confused and
B: This might prevent permission issues when copying over data from the old system, since both users are identical (sort of).

But maybe I am wrong and this will actually create potential for trouble. What is the consensus on this?

 

[MrDidel]

Having the same username and password out of convenience might be a good reason, but the others arent. If i'm not mistaken, each user has his own UUID (Universally Unique IDentifier), and everything depending on a specific user will probably use that specific UUID, rather than the username, password or the combination of both. So if you would encounter any permission-related issues, they won't be (re)solved by mimicking the same user account anyways. The newly created home-folder for your new user and its subfolders will automatically have the right permissions, along with any files you place there afterwards. If you do still encounter any permission problems after you've copied anything to your new home-folder, you should reset home-folder permissions and the ACL's. This can be done by booting the machine in recovery-mode (press and hold cmd and r during booting until the appears), choose terminal from the utilities menu in the menu bar, type resetpassword in the terminal window , choose the user account you just created and copied the files to from the dropdown and press the reset home-folder permissions and ACL's button in the bottom of the window. That should fix any permission-related issues to anything in the home folder. You can then reboot your mac from the menu bar as you would do normally.

 

[Weaselboy]

You can do it either way and you won't have any permissions issues. If you want to name the account the same you certainly can.

 

[danqi]

Allright, thanks for the info!

 

[MacUser2525]

Having the same username and password out of convenience might be a good reason, but the others arent. If i'm not mistaken, each user has his own UUID (Universally Unique IDentifier), and everything depending on a specific user will probably use that specific UUID, rather than the username, password or the combination of both. So if you would encounter any permission-related issues, they won't be (re)solved by mimicking the same user account anyways. The newly created home-folder for your new user and its subfolders will automatically have the right permissions, along with any files you place there afterwards. If you do still encounter any permission problems after you've copied anything to your new home-folder, you should reset home-folder permissions and the ACL's. This can be done by booting the machine in recovery-mode (press and hold cmd and r during booting until the appears), choose terminal from the utilities menu in the menu bar, type resetpassword in the terminal window , choose the user account you just created and copied the files to from the dropdown and press the reset home-folder permissions and ACL's button in the bottom of the window. That should fix any permission-related issues to anything in the home folder. You can then reboot your mac from the menu bar as you would do normally.

More specifically the name you see displayed is just that a name all *nix systems alias the actual user number of the account to the name you specify when displaying in a gui/terminal. If you want to confirm this go into the user account in System Preferences and it will show you the actual account number in there if my memory serves me it will be 501 for the first account created. You need to unlock then right click on the account name advanced option to see it.