Question Convert One User Profile to Another on Same Computer

[EddieK]

Hi. I hope I can explain this and sure hope someone knows what I am talking about. I googled it but none appears to be for my situation.

First, the background. I got a computer with Windows 11. Dell did the migration. However, there were a lot of settings and icons missing. Little did I know that I logged in as BOBBY user but the files listed in the Documents folder do not appear there. At that time, I did not realize I had another user names BNAMER which does have all my documents.

This PC\Users\BOBBY (does not have my document files)
This PC\Users\BNAMER (has my document files)

Note: I recently installed all my programs onto BOBBY user before realize what was wrong and did all kinds of configurations to Windows as well that I like to keep.

What I need to know is can I safely just copy all the files contained in the BNAMER user profile and paste it to the BOBBY user profile?

Any do's and don't's? Registry edits?

Thank you.

 

[JohnBonhamsGhost]

can I safely just copy all the files contained in the BNAMER user profile and paste it to the BOBBY user profile?

any personal documents(text, audio, video, images, game saves, etc) can be safely copied from one user's library folders to another.

applications, settings pertaining to those applications, or any user profiles contained in those applications would usually be a bit more in-depth task depending on which specific one was in question.

one easy way to avoid this type of situation in the future can be to create these library folders(Music, Pictures, Videos, etc) on another disk and assign these as the current user folders by right-clicking on each library folder, selecting the 'Locations' tab, and moving them to the new location.
each new OS install or upgrade you can then reassign them to the same same location each time without moving/migrating the data.

 

[EddieK]

Hi. Thank you for responding.

Simliar issue but slightly different. I was able to get the files moved from one user account to another.

The issue I am having is the outlook pst files. With the email accounts already setup previously, I am unable to change the folder path for the pst file for each email account. I can add them via Data Files tab but it will not show them being linked up to their respective email account. I did all this going through the Control Panel selecting the Mail option.

FYI: These pst files are not listed in the AppData folder. We've always had them in the user profile account listed under 'Documents' folder.

Users\<current user>\Documents

So I am not sure if I missed something or if it will better if I just delete my current email account setup for Outlook and recreate them manually and then add the pst file to each account respectively??

 

[USAFRet]

If there was some other user account already existing on there, I would strongly recommend a full wipe and reinstall of the OS.

Save any personal docs you want off to somewhere else, and then a full deletion of all partitions and reinstall.

 

[EddieK]

Thank you. Got it worked out!! Again, thanks for taking the time to answer my post.