Moving Users Data to New Macs

[tommyday]

Hi,

When our employees and students get new laptops every few years, we load an image on the new machine with apps etc, bind it to AD, login in with the AD user to create a mobile account. We would then copy the user data from old machine to the new by target disk mode, drag and drop. Just wondering how others accomplish this every summer in the edu world?

[ovek]

To put it simply I don't... well I tell them to back up stuff or they loose it

[seawolf]

We require that staff have a Time Machine backup for their laptops. Then when their laptop is ever re-imaged or migrated to a new laptop we ask for the TM drive and run a final backup, which usually takes only a few minutes. Then we image the Mac, and finally restore user accounts and apps from the TM backup.

[tommyday]

In no way are we in a position to tell people to back it up themselves or lose it, not our culture in the school. BTW we do backup all user work via Crash Plan Pro which is one of the best purchase we ever made.

 

TM really isn't an option for us in a near enterprise setup, we are talking 1000 machines. We promise users that their new machine will have all of their data less any custom apps they installed which they will do themselves

[seawolf]

In no way are we in a position to tell people to back it up themselves or lose it, not our culture in the school. BTW we do backup all user work via Crash Plan Pro which is one of the best purchase we ever made.

 

Why do you use target disk mode, then use drag and drop data as your restore method when you could use the migration utility in target disk mode with far less manual intervention (manual file copies can fail, has happened to us no more than one occasion) and when it would also provide the option of bringing over the users custom apps and settings? If you do that the user would only have to renter passwords and not all of the othe setup and config tasks. Other than the fact it was a new laptop they would wonder of you had done anything at all - that's a big advantage unix based systems have over Windows in the migration/restore area - might as well take advantage of it.

 

Also, why do you use target disk mode at all if you are just dragging and dropping files and not pulling apps and user config across when you have crash plan pro with all user data backups? If you have a near enterprise setup then you must be using Deploy Studio, Casper, etc. - just script a restore task at the end of your image using the crash plan backups.

[tommyday]

Seawolf when you say "migration utility", are you referring to migration assistant?

 

Yes We use DS and Casper, but pulling down data from the network with Crash Plan is very time consuming. A colleague wrote a shell script today using rsync that we invoke after the image process, works really well.