Alternative to Deep Freeze for Mac

[Carter]

For sometime now I've been looking into an alternative or solution to remove the need of using Faronics Deep Freeze and I've been testing a setup that so far has promise.

 

For the new school year my plan is to turf Deep Freeze all together. Over the past few weeks I’ve come up with a script & launchd.plist that it set to run on a reboot of the computer or on a set schedule that clears all user profiles except for the "administrator" & "Shared" users. Ive been testing it here where it’s set for 3am. This way if there is a power failure or a student needs to restart a computer they will not lose any files if they had them on the desktop or anywhere in their profile. If the computer is on at 3am the profiles will get removed or if the computer was off all night then it will run once it gets turned on.

 

 

Students are standard users so they already cannot write to the root of the HD without admin access so this keeps extra files from building up. Deep Freeze is nice but it sucks if you forget to freeze a computer and fills up or if you have it frozen and make changes and everything gets removed.

 

I've had a few test computers in the office but this week I'm imaging computers in our student commons that will be in live production computers. On tops of that it's running our new image OS X 10.10 Yosemite that will be used in the next 15/16 school year.

 

This year I'm taking management a step up with running Profile Manager, Munki Management, Munki Reports & Deploy Studio for a full streamlined solution. I wanted to get rid of Deep Freeze and this is what I can up with and so far testing is great.

 

If theres interest from others I can work on a document for this.

[davidacland]

Sounds good. This is the same route we've taken for client sites that were using deep freeze. We always found DF too heavy handed and an extra burden when it came to patch management etc.

 

The only extra exception we had to include (in some cases) were specialist labs that were leaving Mac Pros doing rendering jobs etc. In those cases we only set the data to delete once per week.

 

Regarding profiles and profile manager, it might be worth trying the newest version of Munki instead. PM is a bit unstable and could cause more problems than it solves.