MacOS – Are symlinks recognized by iCloud

I realise you are not looking to duplicate all of your files, but this method is quick and at the end you can just delete the files you don't want on the new account. To create a duplicate account based on the settings of your current account, try this:

1. Making a Time Machine backup of the current account.

   No extra disk for backing up? Go to Disk Utility and create a partition on your current disk. Assuming you have space (I will, since you are looking to add an additional user account), you can add a partition to your startup disk without losing any data (you can also remove it or change the size after you are done). Make this new partition your Time Machine backup disk.

2. Launch the Migration Assistant utility (search for it in Spotlight).

3. In Migration Assistant, indicate that you want to import settings from a Time Machine backup.
4. In Migration Assistant, select to import the user account from the backup.
5. Because the name is the same as your current account, Migration Assistant will prompt you to rename the account.
6. Continue the migration and your new user account will be made–a duplicate of the current account except for the username.

I'm doing this right now in Lion and it is working a treat. Good luck.

The first step I would recommend is to try resetting your home folder permissions with the Reset Password utility in Lion Recovery. (Despite the name of the utility, you won't actually be resetting any passwords.)

Resetting the home folder permissions with the Reset Password utility will reset both the owner and the permissions.

1. Restart your Mac holding ⌘+R to boot into Lion Recovery, which will bring you to the Repair Utilities screen.

2. Open Terminal from the Utilities menu.

3. In Terminal, enter resetpassword to open the Reset Password utility.

4. Choose your hard drive icon at the top, then choose your user from the drop-down menu below. Do not reset the password here.

5. At the bottom of the window, under "Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs", click the "Reset" button. This may take awhile if you have a lot of files in your home folder.

This should solve your permissions problems for most apps. However, it's possible you may have a few apps which had saved files with special permissions that are different from the user's default permissions (like preferences or application support files). For those apps, you may need to delete their preferences or reinstall the app.

If resetting your home folder permissions doesn't work, then you may need to try restoring from a backup or transferring your data to an external drive.