What to Do After Deleting the At Ease Items Folder

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Huh?

By Robert Dorsett

You may find that to resolve an At Ease problem you can either throw away the At Ease Items folder or throw away At Ease Preferences, At Ease Setups, and At Ease Users. The result is that you have a "fresh" At Ease, with no users. You now need to re-create those users. Before doing so, we need to recover information (files) belonging to the previous users.

User Application Access Information

At Ease stores information in a variety of places. In the System Folder, the At Ease Items folder contains a folder called At Ease Setups. This contains the "application" side of your users' set-ups. For example, if one of your users is "John", and John has access to ClarisWorks and Quicken, aliases for these two applications are in a folder named "John" within At Ease Setups. Aliases are just pointers to the original items and are completely disposable. In other words, if you throw the aliases away, you will not be throwing away or in any way damaging the actual applications.

User Personal File Storage Folder

The files that John has created are in a different folder, which is also called "John". This folder is elsewhere on your system. If you have a Macintosh Performa computer, this folder is in the Documents folder. The files John created could include things such as homework assignments, correspondence, Quicken ledgers, and so on.

Recreating At Ease User Information You need to be careful as to what you do with this data, both to ensure that the data is not lost, and that when you reconfigure At Ease, the user has access to the data again. The "John" folder containing all the original data is intact, which is exactly what we want.

When you open the At Ease Setup application to recreate "John", you will see an error message, because the "John" folder is still in your Documents folder. It will not let you re-use that name until something is changed about the "John" folder. Something must be done about that "John" folder, but you do not want to throw it away, since it contains original data.

Rename The User's Data Folder

The solution is to rename the "John" folder to something else, such as "John-Backup".

Step 1: Locate the folder, which, again, is in the Documents folder.
Step 2: Click once on the name. The name should highlight (white rectangle around it). If it does not, try pressing the Return key once. Just tap it. This should highlight it. Once highlighted, whatever you type replaces what is there. Type "John-Backup".
Step 3: Next, go back to At Ease Setup, and re-create "John". Add all necessary applications and otherwise configure it according to your tastes.
Step 4: When finished, quit At Ease Setup.
Step 5: Restart the computer. A new folder called "John" is created; there is nothing in it.
Step 6: If you are not already in the Finder (a way to tell if you are in the Finder is that the Trash can visible), select "Go to Finder" from the Special menu.
Step 7: If you look inside your Documents folder, you will notice there is a new "John" folder.
Step 8: Open the "John-Backup" folder. Move the files that are inside this folder to the "John" folder.
Step 9: Throw away the "John-Backup" folder.
Step 10: Restart you computer.
Step 11: Open the "John" folder in the Documents folder. You should now see all of John's original documents.

You must repeat this process for each of your At Ease users.

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