Accounts

OK, this thread finally prodded me to decide that perhaps I should stop logging in as admin by default, and set up a standard account for everyday use.

Easy enough... but is there any quick way of "copying" the admin desktop over to the standard account to save setting it up from scratch again?

Login as Admin and then in finder copy the desktop folder form /users/[AdminAccount] to /users/[NewAccount]/desktop.

I think that should sort it. Can't be sure as mine is blank.

I looked at that folder, but all it seems to contain is the folders etc that I've got on the desktop (all one of them ).

I should have been clearer- what I really want to do is duplicate it completely- wallpaper, screen saver, dock layout... even better would be some way of keeping them in sync, but that may be asking a bit too much

At a bit of a guess - copy over the desired .pref files.

Sounds likely... unless I get a better idea from someone I'll leave it until I'm back home on the iMac, I've got Time Machine on that one

A good line of thought.

Bill - I'm afraid it requires use of the terminal , but this link should tell you what you need to do.

I don't think there's any way that you can keep two accounts synchronized. It's good practice, normally, to make the appearance of the root, or Administrator, account distinct from your normal user account. That way it's easier to remember when you are logged on with elevated privileges.

Thanks for the link, but for just one account I think I'll take a screen dump and do it the hard way

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It's good practice, normally, to make the appearance of the root, or Administrator, account distinct from your normal user account.

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Good practice? What's that? I'm an engineer, don't forget- what is best is what works

In a multi-user or "work" environment I'd agree with you, but this is just for me at home... if I screw it up there's nobody but me to blame

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In a multi-user or "work" environment I'd agree with you, but this is just for me at home...

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Clearly you're not so absent-minded as I am.

Ugh that's not what Macs are for! Forget about complicating a lovely experience and go back to enjoying the full admin - additional accounts are not worth the extra disk space

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the extra disk space

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Hmm, that made me think... I've got 250GB in the iMac, 150GB in the MacBook, a 1TB firewire for music and movies and only a 500GB firewire for Time Machine. The first three are nowhere near full yet, but some thought is clearly needed

Some of us have a mere 80 GB in our MacBooks

hence I have a 500GB Desktop External and a 320GB Portable AND I'm trying to clear some room on the MacBook [ standing at 50ishGB just now ]

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a mere 80 GB

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My first desktop at work (a Sirius) had a 10MB¹ hard drive, and I wondered what I would ever do with all that storage


¹ and that's not a typo!

I can't wait for the day it's all stored in a cloud so we're no longer chained to blocks of hardware hanging around making the place look a mess!

You'll still have your blocks of hardware. For back-ups just to be on the safe side.

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it's all stored in a cloud

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Wireless NAS comes close....

Hmm - I don't go back that far

My first computer was a Mac Quadra AV with a HUGE 2GB hard drive [ some graphics students had had it before me and swapped the hard drive ]

Can't think how I managed with it , looking back

I believe they actually made 5Mb hard disks, but, like you, I had the luxury of 10Mb on my first XT. Considering most people worked quite happily with a couple of 360Kb floppies, 10Mb was a decent amount of storage. They had to introduce a hierarchical file system to deal with it!

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a hierarchical file system

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Didn't that come in with DOS 3? My Sirius came with DOS 2.11 iirc, no sub-directories

The hierarchical file system was introduced in MS-DOS 2.0. The DOS on your Sirius may well have been different - if I remember correctly they, like the early Apricots, weren't PC-compatible.

With a limit of 64 files, as in MS-DOS 1, a 10Mb hard disk wouldn't have been of much use!

My excuse is that it was a long while ago

The certainly weren't PC-compatible... the floppies that would hold 360KB on a PC held 1.2MB on a Sirius (variable speed drives and variable sectors/track), and if you loaded it up with 1MB of RAM then chkdsk would show (I think) 786KB free... DOS auto-relocated to top of memory during bootup.

Good machines... weird architecture though, so not easily extendable when the 286 chip came out I believe

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You'll still have your blocks of hardware. For back-ups just to be on the safe side.

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Nah I trust in iDisk - 30GB just isn't enough!

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variable speed drives and variable sectors/track

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If memory serves me aright, clever people managed to get the drives to play tunes. A bit like the Renault-F1 boys' favourite trick.

You memory serves you right well .

(I only used the apps, I didn't write them).

The easiest way is probably to set youir 'new' account as an admin account, log in to that and 'downgrade' your original account to a normal user account. That way you retain all your usual desktop and preference settings.

Brilliant!

Lateral thinking. The best solutions are always the simplest ones.

I did think of that, but it's not quite what I was after... I want both accounts to have the same settings

Apart from any that may be dictated by the different privileges of course.

Did you Google the question? The first link I followed from a search on "duplicate os x account" led to this page. Any good?

Edited by deleted (Wed 07-Jan-09 11:20:53)

I googled "duplicate mac account" which wasn't too helpful... I need to think a bit more about the search terms I use

That looks a useful link, as do a lot of others when I use the same terms as you!

Thanks.

...and do you want to keep them in sync going forwards? In which case you probably need to be linking things rather then copying them. Not sure what permission issues you'll run into then.

It does seem a lot of hard work and I'm not sure what the benefit is.

...of course if you just want to start from the same setup there are a number of methods to clone the account as you've already discovered.

If it could be done easily then keeping them in sync would be a nice bonus, but if it isn't then I can live without it

A little scripting and a crontab entry would do the job - but I suspect this doesn't meet your criterion.