I recently discovered that my MacBook Pro had developed a fault whereby the DVD drive would read any DVD I cared to insert but would no longer accept blank DVDs. This turned out to be a known issue with certain brands of drive that Apple use, or just dirt on the lens (take your pick but I’m not putting a lens cleaning disc through that narrow slot). As the extended warranty on it runs until April I took it in to my local Apple store where they agreed to fix it under warranty. Somewhat caught out (I was travelling home after a few days away) I bought a Western Digital My Passport and copied my home directory, all 150Gb of it, so that I had a backup.
Arriving home I now needed to ‘restore’ my account onto my Mac Mini to get access to, well, everything. At first I wasn’t sure how easy this would be but after a search on the Apple forums I came up with the following approach which worked a treat.
First I logged in as an administrator and created an empty folder, ‘phil’, which matched the existing username on my Macbook Pro, un the /Users folder.
I then copied over the Applications and Library folders from the My Passport drive to the new folder.
Finally I used System Preferences to create a new account, ‘phil’. Seeing the existing folders I was asked if I wanted to (a) use them or (b) delete them. Choosing option (a) left me with a usable account after a few moments.
Logging in to the ‘new’ account it was like I’d never been away – everything moved across seamlessly; desktop layout, email, calendar, address book… everything I needed. Obviously I was missing some software but this can be rectified. The main thing is that there is an easy way to migrate an account, and all its setttings, between Macs when you need to do so unexpectedly, and without Migration Assistant or a Time Machine backup.
When I get my laptop back in about a week I can simply reverse the process. All my activity in email (and everywhere else) will move back and it’ll be like I never lost my good old MacBook Pro. It may be almost three years old, I may be starting to dream about a new Core i7 laptop sometime next year, but it will be missed this week. Just not as much as I expected.