Home folder different than account name

I have to edit this question after spending a frustrating (frightening?) afternoon looking at this friend's computer.

He is older and quite vulnerable (he just lost his wife), but he is mac-literate, having used them for years. He relies on his photo albums - he is a well known architect.

Anyway, he bought a new machine some months ago, and hired a local consultant to set up the machine and migrate his files from his old system.

The user accounts are set up so that "consultant" is the account name.

The user part of the file system looks something like this:

/Users/consultant/files

/Users/friend/files/files

All files (documents, images, etc) are owned by consultant.

(The frightening part is that the consultant (who has skipped town), left an open login so he can connect anytime, without any kind of password control).

So, my question is this: I need a reality check on how to proceed. Copy the user files to an external drive? Script? What about the accounts?

Is there something else to check?

I want the files to end up in:

/Users/friend/

i would welcome any more advice (shell scripts, methods, etc).

A friend has a iMac which has been recently set up by a consultant. I found that the home folder doesn't match the name of the user account name—rather, it's the name of the consultant (grrrh).

Is this a problem? Should I rebuild the system? Add a new user account?

Solution 1:

The Apple Support Knowledgebase is your friend.

There are a few steps needed to change the homefolder name, requiring logging in as the root user, which requires that the root user be enabled and then disabled when the task completed.

The process is much simpler in 10.5 or greater and is a bit more cumbersome in 10.4 and earlier.

Solution 2:

Just to finish this question, I finally got the computer fixed, but it was harder than the Apple Knowledgebase would suggest. While that worked fine to bring over all user files, it did not seem to bring the ~/Library. I had to build this manually. That is, reload the ApplicationSupport, Preferences and other folders. It was tedious. Maybe I made mistakes on the way, but I really tried to follow the steps as outlined in the Apple document.

The second thing that did not work was the Keychain access. The way the document is written, it appears that you only have to fuss with KA when using 10.4. That's incorrect. Keychain Access has to be updated to reflect the new user information. This was on a 10.7.4 system.

Anyway, thanks for all the advice. I hope the client appreciates what has happened.