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<blockquote data-quote="chas_m" data-source="post: 1423168">deBronkart:The answer to your perfectly sensible question about why didn't Migration Assistant transfer your stuff into the account you were already using is simple: because it can't possibly know which of the thousands of files (large and small) it's bringing over you want to a) overwrite, b) use the &quot;original&quot; one, c) use the &quot;new&quot; one. And even if it asked you, for each of the tens of thousands of files, settings, preferences etc -- you likely wouldn't know the correct answer anyway.This is EXACTLY why Migration Assistant is intended (and even asks you!) to be used BEFORE you set up your new account and start using it. It's not a case of &quot;do it our way&quot; it's a case of &quot;if you do things your way, we MAY NOT be able to figure out what you've done and automatically put things right.&quot;It would be nice if Apple had a &quot;merge accounts&quot; feature for people who make this mistake, but again the same problem rears its head: once you've started using an account, you've already generated new prefs, new files, new data and new settings. Which one -- on a case-by-case basis -- should Migration Assistant use?Luckily this is a pretty easy problem to fix. Move just the data from your Home folder in (your new and fairly empty account) into the Shared folder in Users. Sign out of your new account. Log into the &quot;old&quot; (migrated) account and pull the moved data from Shared into your own Home folder in the same location it was in the old account, carefully overwriting when you are sure that's what you want to do. Then restart.PS. Just to be perfectly clear: do NOT move stuff from any folder OTHER than your own home folder.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="chas_m, post: 1423168"] deBronkart: The answer to your perfectly sensible question about why didn't Migration Assistant transfer your stuff into the account you were already using is simple: because it can't possibly know which of the thousands of files (large and small) it's bringing over you want to a) overwrite, b) use the "original" one, c) use the "new" one. And even if it asked you, for each of the tens of thousands of files, settings, preferences etc -- you likely wouldn't know the correct answer anyway. This is EXACTLY why Migration Assistant is intended (and even asks you!) to be used BEFORE you set up your new account and start using it. It's not a case of "do it our way" it's a case of "if you do things your way, we MAY NOT be able to figure out what you've done and automatically put things right." It would be nice if Apple had a "merge accounts" feature for people who make this mistake, but again the same problem rears its head: once you've started using an account, you've already generated new prefs, new files, new data and new settings. Which one -- on a case-by-case basis -- should Migration Assistant use? Luckily this is a pretty easy problem to fix. Move just the data from your Home folder in (your new and fairly empty account) into the Shared folder in Users. Sign out of your new account. Log into the "old" (migrated) account and pull the moved data from Shared into your own Home folder in the same location it was in the old account, carefully overwriting when you are sure that's what you want to do. Then restart. PS. Just to be perfectly clear: do NOT move stuff from any folder OTHER than your own home folder. [/QUOTE]

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