I’ve had the same home directory for a long time, migrating it and it’s data from one machine to another for years.  In the process I’ve accumulated a lot of cruft that ballooned my home directory to a whopping 73.5GB of disk space.  This was becoming a pain to manage, so I decided to freshen things up a bit. I chose to do this immediately following getting my XServe to behave with a bit more stability.  

Traditionally, when I’m doing a reinstall of my system I’d make sure to have a full backup of my entire home directory, and then import that backup in and be up and running with no changes.  I opted NOT to do that this time, however.   Instead I backed up the things MOST important to me - my iTunes library,  my iPhoto library and my Aperture library, along with the domain file from iWeb and a few assorted documents.  (I also backed up my Adium 2.0 folder under ~/Library/Application Support/ becuase I really like how I had it configured and didn’t want to deal with reconfiguring it).  Most of this was accomplished by simply copying what I wanted to backup onto an external hard drive.  The one exception to that is the Aperture library, which I backed up by creating a vault on the external hard drive and adding my whole library to the vault.   

After that I performed a clean install of Leopard,  the patches and updates and various bits of software (iLife ‘08,  iWork ‘08, Aperture, LaunchBar and several other paid-for programs I wanted to keep).    On my OD server I created a new user account and set it up to create a portable home directory on login.  Once I had that set up and had the MBP bound to the OD server I logged in as that user and when prompted told it to create the home directory.    This didn’t take long at all since there was really nothing to sync in the initial sync. 

Once I was logged in and had the home directory created I started migrating in the data I wanted to keep - I copied the iTunes library to the appropriate place on the filesystem ( ~/Music/iTunes) and the iPhoto library to the appropriate place as well (~/Pictures/), then opened up Aperture and had it rebuild the library from the vault I created on the external hard drive.  This process took a while, and when it was finished I had to restart Aperture.   It then took a little while longer to rebuild all of the projects I had been working with,  and it had to regenerate all of the thumbnails,  but once finished everything was perfect. 

iTunes simply required launching itunes and telling it that you would import files yourself later (instead of having it search for them).    Once you do that it will take you too your library and probably display a message like “updating library”, which takes only a few minutes at worst (for me anyway) and once completed you’re up and running.  You can either authorize your computer yourself, or wait until you play something bought through itunes - it’ll prompt you to do it then. 

iPhoto required nothing special - I just started it and it worked and saw my images.   

iWeb was likewise pretty easy.  To restore it all I had to do was take the domain file I backed up (found in ~/Library/Application Support/iWeb) and put it back in the same location.    Starting iWeb then will find the domain file and it’ll be like nothing ever happened.  

Plopping Adium 2.0’s folder into Application Support likewise worked beautifully.  Adium was configured exactly how I wanted it when I first launched it. 

The documents got copied into ~/Documents,   a no-brainer to many.

So - everything was working great,  until I realized I forgot to back up some important stuff.    In particular, Things and 1Password. 

Turns out I didn’t need to - my iPhone saved me.  I fired up both app’s and synced them with their counterparts on my iPhone and *poof*,  everything is restored on both.  Beautiful. 

So now I have a system that has all of the files I wanted to save, and none of the cruft I wished I could be rid of.   It’s backed up to the server and everything FINALLY seems to be operating properly.  

Sure, it was a time consuming process but well worth it in my estimation.  I applaud Apple’s ability to make transitioning to new machines as easy as importing your user accounts,  but eventually you get to a point where your account is bloated and needs to be slimmed.  I probably COULD have gone through and tried cleaning a lot of this out by hand, but this seemed to be a much simpler approach.  

[edit 9/9/08]:  I want to note, because it wasn’t clear in my post, that I had (and still have) and maintain full and complete backups for the system and my files. Should any of this have NOT worked I could have recovered easily.  I strongly encourage the use of backups.   

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