I messed up big time while trying to rename my user account on my MacBook Air. I ran some terminal commands recommended by Gemini, and now I'm stuck in my empty secondary admin account. I can see my old and new user profiles in the /Users folder, but I can't access any of my files. Apple support was helping me for an hour, but after rebooting in safe mode, it looks like all my files are gone. I do see some of my iCloud backups from my iPhone, but I'm really nervous about trying to recover anything because I don't want to lose even more data. I didn't make a backup, and when I opened TimeMachine, it wanted me to set it up again, which is confusing. I've got the logs from both Gemini and the terminal, but I'm feeling completely lost. Any advice would be a lifesaver!
2 Answers
You might just need to fix the naming conflict. If your user folder's name no longer matches the account name, then you could potentially still recover everything. Try checking the settings again to match them up. Just be cautious with any AI commands in the future—it’s better to stick to the UI for important changes!
Running AI-generated commands without understanding them can be really risky! It sounds like a tough lesson. You should be careful when talking to Apple support about this—it can be tricky, and they might not provide the specialized help you need. If you have the commands from Gemini, share them here. It’ll help the tech experts figure out what went wrong and how to fix it without losing your data!
Definitely share the commands! This will help diagnose the problem better. It's possible your username in the Users folder doesn’t match the settings now, which is a common issue when renaming accounts.
Totally agree! Always best to use the built-in settings for renaming. It's much safer than terminal commands unless you're really sure!