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URGENT :Files Cannot be found after Changing the Home Folder's Name!!

J

jotsib

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Well, things here look like a disaster..
The user changed the name of the home folder and then all the preferences and the files inside the user's library dissappeared..

Now Mac OS X has creatd a new user with the new name, and it has transfered many files (music, pictures, documents etc) from the old user but none of the preferneces and especially the mail folder of the library is nowhere, as well the mail preferneces..
It also has keeped an folder for the old user with only some preferences.. which dont help at all..

Situation here is tough, and I dont know what to do to take back the mailboxes with all the messages. There is nothing in the trash...

We use Mac OS X 10.4.8.

I think all we need is a Time Machine, to go back in the time..
Does anyone have any idea ??? How could I recover/ find the whole user's folder ?

Thanx
 
Apple has a support document about this. What should have happened is that everything remained in the old user directory, but it sounds like the user managed to move pieces of it from the old directory to the new directory.

Everything should still be there, but it's now split across two user accounts, with some things (like preference files) existing in multiple versions if they were used in the different accounts. Does that sound about right? If so, it seems like it could be a tricky fix, depending on how much the user moved between accounts. You can try moving things back into the user account and then use Apple's support document to rename things and get back to the way it was before the directory was renamed. Things like preference files probably shouldn't be moved, because there are proper versions of them already existing in the old directory. But music, pictures, etc. should go back to the old directory.

OS X wouldn't have moved everything to the new user account by itself after the renaming, so I'm not sure what happened there. The mail folders really should still be there somewhere. Without seeing the system, it's really tough for me to give any more specific advice.
 
There have been quite a few instances of this happening recently. Could we make a sticky that adresses the problem?
 
Blubbert said:
There have been quite a few instances of this happening recently. Could we make a sticky that adresses the problem?
Click to expand...

I agree that might be a good idea, though if people just searched before posting new threads....🙄
 
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