When I replaced my old iMac (after it’s graphics card died), I had setup my new one and then migrated the old one via Apple’s account migration tools. Of course I had messed up and could not use my old account name, so in an effort to just get a working iMac I appended -blank to the account name. This got me up and working quickly and I then deleted the temporary account, that I had setup to test the machine (which had my old account name).

So on the US 4th of July holiday I had time to finally rename the account and get rid of the annoying -blank at the end of the account name. Since I was not going to change the home directory, I figured life would be good and I would not have any issues with installed software, etc. Boy was I wrong.

Many of the non-appStore software required me to re-register (not really a big surprise) and I had to log into the AppStore for some of the AppStore based software to re-authenticate the application with my account. These were not big deals, but when I started my iTunes library, all hell broke lose.

I have a very large library of ripped Movies, TV Shows, and Albums (from my purchased Blu-ray’s, DVDs, LPs, and Cassette tapes), as well as a significant amount of iTunes and MoviesAnywhere content. So large in fact that I have terabytes of storage used up on my Drobo5N with my library. When iTunes starts it points at a iTunes Library on the Drobo5N that contains 6-8TBs of media content. The the first thing that happens is iTunes starts re-organizing the library and creating additional copies of the files on the Drobo5N, while I have 6TBs of free space, duplicating the library again would likely fill the Drobo5N and cause issues. I canceled the re-organization and discovered that iTunes now couldn’t find any of the content. Every song required me to “locate” the file, which then would scan the drive and not find the rest of the library. Same with Movies and TV Shows. I looked and iTunes had created a new iTunes library file, which was having issues. I figured this was an easy fix, just point back at the old library file, Nope! That made it worse.

After 3 more trial and error fits and starts, I exited iTunes and started looking at my directory structure on the Drobo5N. There were multiple copies of the music, TV Shows, and Movies directories, all in various stages of completeness. Music was duplicated, TV Shows were duplicated, and Movies had both duplicates and strange directory setups. So over the last weekend, I decided to create a new manual directory structure and de-dupe all the music, movies, and TV Shows. This is where the ditto command comes in (ditto -V source_directory destination_directory [the -V will show you all the copies as they happen]). If you’ve never used the ditto command, it will merge directories and keep all the metadata for files. If you try to merge directories via Finder it has been known to replace the directories and there by deleting some files you want to keep. The music library took 3 ditto commands, to merge all the directories together, and two days. The TV Shows was done via move in the finder, as the shows were much more all or nothing in the splits. The Movies were done as ditto (a parallel 2 days).

Today when I have time, I will delete the iTunes “library” file, and build a new one, importing all the movies, music and tv shows into the library. The directory structure will be the already defined iTunes library so hopefully it won’t create yet another copy of all the content. If you follow my blog you will remember the music sort discussion last year. I really really hope that the meta data is correctly attached to the files, and I will not have to do too much clean up.

The lesson after all of this, don’t rename your account.