Much as it pains me to say so, I would absolutely not blame her if she did. I might even recommend it were I in your position. Clearly, it’s a decision she has to make based on what she does, and how much “adjustment” pain she’s willing to endure, but having to wonder how much of her personal information may be “leaking” into her work environment due to some incomprehensible weirdness linking these two machines is a source of constant pain of a different type.
Or, could she maybe have her IT department “reprovision” the work Mac, taking it back down to bare metal and making it into essentially a “new” company-issued Mac? Surely that would get rid of whatever strangeness is going on.
I believe even I could do that. She’s an admin user after all, so we should be able to wipe it and set it up from scratch.
The reason I hesitate to suggest this to her is the following: if we really want this to succeed in removing any and all traces, she cannot use MA to restore from a previous TM or clone. She will have to do the bulk of that migration by hand. And although all her work docs live in OneDrive and will sync back automatically, her app installs and, worse yet, all her settings will be gone and she’ll need to restore all that by hand. Even more so, if you can’t have both side by side, but need to restore one to match your memory of its former self.
Combined, that’s quite a bridge to cross. Perhaps less so than migrating to Windows entirely (and the pain that results in), but still quite a pain. I’m the wrong guy to sell it too, I’ve been relying on MA for the past 15 years for all my personal systems.
Definitely not a happy path, for sure. I mentioned her IT department only because when I worked in the corporate world, all laptops had to come through the IT “department of sanitization and blessing” in which the appropriate non-user-accessible magic would be injected that allowed said device to even connect to the internal network. If you can just plug a factory Mac fresh out of the box into her work network, then yeah, you could certainly do the restore yourself.
Jeff’s point about trying to configure the Mac yourself versus having IT re-image it is a good one. There are any number of special settings that may need to be configured, depending on the work environment. Examples could include VPNs, attachment to Microsoft Active Directory, enrollment in a mobile devive management (MDM) system, and more.
I’ll try to write some more detailed suggestions later, but I am pretty sure you’ll be able to delete the previous Messages from the computer (and the cloud) without having to reimage the system. The logic may be confusing, but the idea would be to enable Messages in iCloud temporarily, delete all messages, then disable Messages in iCloud, remove all places you can be reached for Messages on the Mac, and then sign out of Messages on the Mac.
It definitely is, in general. At my work that’s the way we’d have to do it.
But in this case that doesn’t apply. As I mentioned above, her IT people only deal with Windows. They don’t deal with Macs or Linux. She set her work Mac up herself when she got it, so she’d wipe it herself now.
All their work stuff is either web based (that’s something her company’s IT actually does really well) or through MS Office and OneDrive, which she can all set up herself. She does need one profile for her work wifi but she can download that and install it herself. Same goes for the VPN config which she uses far more because she’s usually remote. There is no MDM with Macs at her outfit. Back in the day we set up that whole Mac together and these days we could wipe it together. No big deal really.
But that all said, I don’t think we really need to go that far. It would require a lot of manual effort from her, and I see little benefit from all that work. Much easier, we just remove all the Message prefs and caches by hand. That should take care of most of it.
The part we haven’t addressed is that we still don’t understand how this actually happened. Not knowing how all that personal stuff got onto a work computer in spite of completely separate iCloud accounts and iCloud syncing being off, that part bugs me. I never really fully trusted Apple with cloud (and I say that as somebody who does use iCloud, and even pays for more of it) and this certainly didn’t help fix that.
Have you considered running Little Snitch to see if you can find any traffic associated with those dialogs? Perhaps it’s something that Little Snitch could also block, given that it clearly has no functional purpose for her.
Maybe it isn’t iCloud entirely. Can ID/login information leak through MS Office and OneDrive as you have set them up on the work laptop? Do you use them in any way on personal Macs?
I’m not aware of any connection between MS Office and iCloud. The former makes use of OneDrive on her work system. And on her private system, there is neither a trace of MS Office nor of One Drive.
And again, work and private system are linked to TWO entirely separate iCloud accounts.
