Hmm. I believe the best way to migrate data between two user accounts on the same Mac—while preserving ownership and permissions—is to use Apple’s built-in tools rather than manual drag-and-drop. Migration Assistant is ideal if you can temporarily remove one account and re-import it into the other, but when both accounts must remain, a more controlled approach works better. Using an external drive is smart for space-constrained systems, especially if you copy data in chunks and verify permissions as you go.
Here’s my suggested steps that should work even with limited disk space and keeps permissions intact:
- Log in to an admin account (not the source or destination user).
- Connect the external drive formatted as APFS or Mac OS Extended.
- Copy the source user’s home folder from `/Users/olduser` to the external drive using Finder or using this command in the Terminal: sudo ditto /Users/olduser /Volumes/External/olduser
- Log in as the destination user and copy the data back to their home folder.
- To fix ownership and permissions use these commands: sudo chown -R newuser:staff /Users/newuser & sudo chmod -R u+rwX /Users/newuser
- Verify access to Documents, Desktop, Pictures, Mail, and any app-specific folders.
This approach should avoid the common permission issues you’d see with simple Finder copies and ensures the destination user truly owns the files.
As you know, if the goal is a full account replacement, Migration Assistant from a Time Machine backup or disk image of the old user is even cleaner.