Hello G-Listers:
I really hope your folks can help - again! I've had a lot of excellent advice here in the past years. I posted the text below on another list about eight days ago but received no reply.
Thanks again for the excellent advice I received to questions in getting ready to install Panther on my QuickSilver G4.
Being the OS X newbie that I am, I went through the canned setup process which set the Administrator account. I immediately imported all my e-mail and the Address Book from the OS 9.2.2 Outlook Express. Then I imported the Favorites from Internet Explorer 5.1 to IE 5.2. Opening Safari for the first time brought the Bookmarks from IE 5.2 to Safari. And I have continued updating both Mail and the Safari Bookmarks since then. All this works fine in the Admin account, but what a blunder!
Now I want to copy or move the e-mail and the Bookmarks to a new user account. Is this feasible and safe? From rummaging around, it appears to be a simple procedure to drag and drop what I want from the Admin account to the new user account.
First question, do you really need to move these to a user account? You could create a new admin user and then change this user to a non-admin account and just use it as a user. Also know that you in OS X being an admin is really like being a regular user until you want to do something administrative then you can do it but you typically have to authenticate with your name and password to do something dangerous.
For e-mail, I could move or copy either the entire Mail folder or its individual contents. The first alternative would be:
Log in as Admin, use Finder's Icon View:
Go to /Admin User's Home/Library/Mail , duplicate the contents of the Mail folder.
Do an option-Drag of the Mail folder icon to the Drop box and drop it on the drop box. This will eliminate the copy step and the copy suffix.
Go to /Admin User's Home/ , open the Public folder to reveal the Drop Box.
Drag all duplicate items to the Drop Box.
Log into new user account, again using Finder's Icon View:
Go to /New User's Home/Public/ , open Drop Box to reveal the duplicate items.
Go to /New User's Home/Library/Mail . Move all contents of Mail folder to Trash.
Drag duplicate items from Drop Box to Mail folder.
Eliminate "copy" from name of each item in Mail folder.
See above.
AFAIK you will need to change the ownership of the Mail folder but I'm not sure if you are using the drop box.
Will this work? Are there issues with permissions or ownership? If so, are there steps to take to resolve the issues?
What about invisible files?
Non AFAIK
As a second alternative, will it work as well to simply duplicate and drag the Admin's Mail folder itself?
See above
And finally, would the technique work in duplicating and dragging the contents of the Admin's Safari folder?
Yes
At /Admin User's Home/Library/ , there is a Caches folder with folders for Mail and Safari which are loaded with stuff three levels down. Do I duplicate and drag these items too?
No. Any cache items should be recreated.
What about the Cookies folder?
You can. Loosing your cookies isn't the end of the world, it just means you would have to reidentify your self on some web sites.
I see the Preferences folder with com.apple.mail.plist and com.apple.Safari.plist.
Try it. I just moved my stuff from one computer to another. When I moved the Safari stuff the preferences didn't come across, just the bookmarks.
Should I dupe/drag these too or just make up new preferences after I start using the new user's account for Mail and Safari? Are there any other preferences involved that are not obvious?
Nothing I can think of. -- Clark Martin Redwood City, CA, USA Macintosh / Internet Consulting
"I'm a designated driver on the Information Super Highway"
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