Should I buy a used 3.33ghz 6 core Mac Pro NOW?

I guess I should of said how to do the compression/expansion.

I do this from terminal. Assume my account name is "myaccountname". Assume you are running from another admin account, or as I do, root.

cd /Users

tar czf myaccountname.tar.gz myaccountname

Those two commands change to the current directory to /Users where my account is currently. Then the entire account is compressed into a tar.gz file called myaccountname.tar.gz. Copy the myaccountname.tar.gz to the destination volume (call it "myhdd" here). Then,

cd /Volumes/myhdd

tar xzf myaccountname.tar.gz

Now there is a copy of the original home dir on myhdd. Fix accounts up to set the home dir as /Volumes/myhdd/myaccountname. Reboot, and you are good to go.

The original myaccountname.tar.gz is still in /Users and another in myhdd. Might as well get rid of them or keep them as a backup. Similarly for the original /Users/myaccountname.

The idea here is creating the tar.gz perserves all the owner, group, permissions settings. The copy is 100% identical to the original. Been doing this as long as there has been OSX (although up to tiger the changing of the home dir pointer was different).

Hi - So I realize this might be a long shot but I was wondering how your mac pro is doing? I am thinking about picking up the same model...

About a year ago a purchased a 2009 4-core with 16 GB RAM for $425 and it is going strong. I added a blade PCle SSD and a PC 5770 graphics card that I already ad.