Two user accounts on MacBook Air sharing one Apple ID.

Question

Two user accounts on MacBook Air sharing one Apple ID.

Hi, after some issues with my own account, I created a new User to work out if problems I was having were localised to the Mac user account. All my files etc now appear on both accounts since that time, and the sign in issues were not replicated on the new account. I assume I'll have multiple files on original account however, that I cannot access from the new one, but there are still issues on the original account.

How can I reduce the heavy strain (Disk almost full warnings) on my laptop without losing data? Can I disassociate the two user accounts, if yes - how do I do that? I would like to remove downloads from original account for example, but don't want to lose those from newer account.

Thanks in advance!

MacBook Air

Posted on Dec 17, 2019 8:54 AM

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Answer 1

Lexiepex

Level 6

14,108 points

Dec 18, 2019 2:02 AM in response to d-lited2meetu

"Disk almost full" is a serious warning. Was it there already before creating the new user? If yes you need to solve that on the old account first.

IMHO this should work: Then make a backup (or two) of all user files in the old account to an outside disk.

then delete the old account. Use the new account and see if it is still OK.

then you can put all files from the backup into the new account.

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Answer 2

Lexiepex

Level 6

14,108 points

Dec 17, 2019 9:40 AM in response to d-lited2meetu

Delete one of the two, then restart.

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Answer 3

Dec 17, 2019 9:46 AM in response to Lexiepex

Thanks for your response Lexiepex, however that leaves me with either deleting my main account that I have had for years - and potentially losing files but having the ongoing issue re problems with Apple ID / logging into accounts etc or deleting the newer account, which works absolutely fine, but has only been in use for a fairly short time. I'm looking for a way to 'disconnect' the two without losing additional files / info if that is possible? That would give me the option to sort through downloads etc independently I think / hope.

Is this an option? If yes, what should I do?

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Answer 4

dot.com

Level 4

2,455 points

Dec 17, 2019 10:16 AM in response to d-lited2meetu

If you will open a Terminal window and do a little bit of investigating, we might get a better idea of what is going on. But first a question or two:

Did you use Setup Assistant or Migration Assistant to migrate old user account into a new macOS version? How did the second account and files get created?

In Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilities):

cd /Users
ls -lan

this will show the user account names and userid values for each. If they indeed are the same (501 I would guess), then a couple more questions:

how did you create the "new User" account - was it in the System Preferences Users & Groups pane or ???
Did you manually assign a userid value or take what the system assigned?

Need to know more info before suggesting what to do next.

Good luck...

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Two user accounts on MacBook Air sharing one Apple ID.

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