Does Setup Assistant preserve UIDs from an old Mac?

Question

Level 1

5 points

Does Setup Assistant preserve UIDs from an old Mac?

I'm hoping to get an explicit answer to this question. I'm going to be setting up a new Mac Pro (Mac OS 10.8) next week, and I want to transfer over all the user information from an older running Mac OS 10.6, and I want to be clear on this point since the machine will read and write to NSF partitions on a Linux server, and thus I want to have all the UID (Mac calls them UniqueIDs?, unix, just User IDs) match the existing system.

I'm imagining that Setup Assistant will offer to copy the user accounts from the source machine (the old Mac Pro) with all the prefs and permissions intact, including UID. This is what I want.

But some howto's I've seen on the web say Setup Assistant first asks the user to create a new account -- which of course would mess everything up, since I'd end up with two UIDs of 501.

Once the users are set, then I imagine that Setup Assistant will copy over Applications.

Many thanks

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Sep 25, 2013 11:17 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Eric Root

Level 10

684,039 points

Sep 25, 2013 11:35 AM in response to macpicque

I think you get the option to transfer first, then set up a new account.

Setup Assistant

Set up a New Mac

Reply

Answer 2

Sep 25, 2013 11:45 AM in response to macpicque

Yes Setup Assistant is run before any user accounts are made on the new system so the UID's will be the same as on the old system.

The confusion is with the app Migration Assistant which does basically the same thing, copies data from the old to the new Mac, but is run as a regular app after the new system is configured and you log in. So in this case as you have a user made on the new system if you use Migration Assistant to copy the users over the UID's will not match.

Reply

Answer 3

macpicque Author

Level 1

5 points

Sep 25, 2013 12:00 PM in response to Frank Caggiano

Thanks.

This should be a piece of cake!

Reply