Questions about accounts

[CRK17]

Recently came back to the Mac world after years away. My wife and I plan on using the Mac for personal use and business use and would like to setup various accounts on the computer. What I was thinking was an account for myself, an account for my wife, one for the business (each of us having access) and on account for the kids.

Now my questions;

1) By using accounts will we each end up with our own iPhoto and iTunes libraries? If so can we move photos and music from one account library to the other account library easily?
2) I understand Time Machine can backup the entire internal HD or selected items. Can you set it up to back up by accounts? Say just mine, my wife’s and the business’s accounts?
3) By using different accounts do you reduce the efficiency of the HD? In other words do you end up using more disk space this way?

 

[xUKHCx]

1.) By default yes but it is possible to set it up so that the libraries can be shared between the accounts

2.) Not sure never done it myself - The way I see it is Time Machine is set up in system preferences so I believe that is it entirely possible to change the settings depending on the account. Edit: There is no reference to your question in Time Machine FAQs

3.) There will be some overhead but it is so tiny that it is not worth worrying about.

 

[cleo]

Follow-up question

Piggyback question:

I'm giving my old Mac mini to a family with three kids this Christmas. Since they range in age from 6 to 13, I'm setting up separate accounts so the mom can use appropriate Parental Controls, and also so the younger one can't accidentally delete the oldest's homework, etc.

I want to put some games on it that they all can play. I tried Frenzic -- registered (I stlll have my own account on the machine)... but when I switch over to a different account, it's back in demo mode. Is that going to be the case with every shareware app? (If so, that seems extremely limiting!) Is there a way around it (input the registration info in each account, maybe)? Do off-the-shelf games pose the same problem? Are there any other app-sharing issues to be aware of with multiple accounts?

 

[xUKHCx]

As far as I am aware this is a per-app basis. It all depends where they keep their preferences. Generally applications will keep their preferences in the user space so that the settings only affect that user, but can keep registration details in the system space so that an application is registered across all accounts. It is something that you can't really predict and so will have to check across the accounts.

You can input the registration into each account.

I can't think of any other application sharing problems across accounts but that is partly because I generally only use one account.