User Account On External Drive - Selling Computer - Buying New

[G.McGilli]

Hi everyone - looking for some advice.

I have an iMac with Catalina.

My daughter has an account on the computer - however due to the copious amounts of video editing she does I bought an external drive a while go and moved her entire user profile to the external drive. She stores all her raw video assets - everything - in her user profile. No problem. Her profile and everything exceeds the size of the internal drive.

I am going to be getting a new iMac soon.

However - I must sell this current iMac first - THEN - I can purchase the new iMac.

My question is - with her user profile on an external drive - can I just sell the current computer and then buy a new one and she just creates a new account and is it easily linked to her old user account on the external drive?

Thank you.

 

[Taz Mangus]

When you get the new computer you can just repoint your child’s user account to the external drive just like you did with your current computer.

You will want to do a clean reinstall of the computer you are selling.

 

[G.McGilli]

When you get the new computer you can just repoint your child’s user account to the external drive just like you did with your current computer.

You will want to do a clean reinstall of the computer you are selling.

Should I look forward to any permissions issues with pointing her account on the new computer to the old user profile that was created on a different computer?

And clean reinstall for sure

 

[Taz Mangus]

Should I look forward to any permissions issues with pointing her account on the new computer to the old user profile that was created on a different computer?

And clean reinstall for sure

The only thing to be aware of is the user ID number that gets assigned when you create the accounts on the new computer. When a user account is created it is assigned a user account ID number. You can see this in Users & Groups. Select the user, right-click with the mouse, select Advanced... If you create the user accounts in the same order on the new computer as you did on the old computer, then thus should not be an issue. Just something to be aware of.