I renamed my 'profile' and lost my settings. Newb needs help!

T

terryit3

Registered
I'm in my second week of using Mac OS X, so please bear with me.

I bought an iBook from a friend a few weeks ago. It is running OS X Tiger 10.4.8. The profile name was named 'daveduncan'. I thought it would be a good idea to change it to 'Terry'. Not such a good idea apparently. I logged out and logged back in and everything I had set was gone. Nothing is a big deal except for the 4000 sports photos and 400 wedding photos I had loaded and keyword'd in iPhoto.

What can I do to get my old user data back? Mainly the data back into iPhoto.
Did I mention I tried renaming it back to 'daveduncan' from 'Terry', so I hope I didn't overwrite anything important.

Is there a 'system restore' or something similar I can use to change my settings to how they were at 9:00 this morning or so?

Any help is much appreciated!

Thanks,
Terry
 
I stuffed things up by editing the name under the home icon and then somehow deleting the new name. Result: logged as admin, but with none of my current files. I solved it by going to system preferences>accounts and creating a new admin file with the name as edited. Maybe this will help you.
 
it is always better to just make a new account with the name you want, transfer the files over, and then delelte the old account.
 
It is kind of weird that you can do this, I suppose that for some users, they may want this feature, but I've never encountered someone like that. Every instance I've heard of, it's been a problem.
 
Meat's "never fails" steps for changing your username:

1. Back up the current data!

2. Make sure the hard drive is in good health.

3. Create a new admin account with the correct username.

4. Log out of the old account and log into the new account

5. Delete the old user account saving the account data to the Deleted Users folder in /Users/Deleted Users (it's the default, I believe).

6. When the old user account has been deleted, double click the old account's disk image (in /Users/Deleted Users) and copy the contents into your new accounts home folder.

7. Log out, then log back in.

8. You can delete the disk image of the old user account (you did back it up, right?)
 
eric2006 said:
It is kind of weird that you can do this, I suppose that for some users, they may want this feature, but I've never encountered someone like that. Every instance I've heard of, it's been a problem.
Click to expand...

<<NOTE: It needs to be said that because changing the short username is a serious procedure, you should do it only as a last resort. The best option is to simply learn to live with your present short username.>> (Bobw's link)

Actually, I was just trying to do a bit of housekeeping, get rid of confusing file paths, duplicate files, etc. I won't do it again in a hurry, though.
 
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