X Marks the Spot : Moving User Profiles, easier and better than Windows

In my Last blog entry I talked about how I upgrade my MAC by installing the CalDigit Raid Card so I could my data from hard drive failures. One of the things that I was protecting was my User Profile data which is where 80% of my data is stored. When I was a windows user, I had copied my windows user profile many time after many “nuke and paves” that were required to keep windows running smoothly and the moving of the user profile was never perfect and never without any problem, there was always settings that didn’t transfer or paths that had to be updated. It never worked with ease, and was always dreadful. With my recent “Data shuffle” while creating and adding hardware raid Protection to my data, I had to move my profile to a different volume name. I must say that it could not have been simpler. I updated the users profile path by right clicking the user, going to advanced and changing the home Directory. Logged out and logged back in and it was exactly the way I left it. Everything was the same, Backgrounds, icons, placement of icons, Icons on dock bar, I was even able to open programs and all their data was in place, simple things like Recently Open Documents list, Settings, Mail in Entourage ( I didn’t have to hunt down the PST). The ONLY thing that was not seamless was VMWARE fusion, my 4 Virtual Machines in the home page were broken links but that was easily fixable by opening them from the new path, which VMWARE is prepared for because it prompts you “ did you move this VM”, simply answer the questions and you will be booting your VMs in no time.
The only problem I had was because I was changing volume names, I had a problem with the volume name getting stuck using an old alias name, A quick Google search, ran a command and I was off to the races. Even with the mishap still better than windows.
Good Job Apple.