Deep Freeze Alternative for Mac

[Carter]

The reason for posting the entire article to my blog is so that I can keep information & files up to date since I can not edit articles here once posted. This edugeek forum will be the primary discussion board for questions and comments.

 

This past year I've been looking to step away from using Faronics Deep Freeze and find an alternative that will handle a similar task of cleaning the user profiles after a restart, set time or day of the week. Sure Deep Freeze has a lot of benifits but we wanted to look into a cheaper solution. For the past few months I've been running this setup in our busiest area at our campus (our student commons) and it has been working great.

 

Why do we need it?

In the run of a day or week we can have countless users logging into a mac desktop using Active Directory credentials and over time the user profiles can eat away at the HD space. That said your average user is browsing the net and so their user profile may only be a small percentage but mixed in with users that dump files onto the desktop or other areas this space can build up fast. This is where Deep Freeze came into play. Deep Freeze would clean up the computer after a restart or set schedule to help keep the comptuer HD clear of un wanted files.

 

What do these scripts do?

With the below scripts in place they essentialy remove any unwanted users. By default the script is set to remove all users except for the "Administrator" & "Shared" user. All other users will be removed. This can be adjusted easily to add other local users. The script included is set to run at 3:30am every Saturday morning. We went with this since most computers are sitting with a 1TB HD and we do not expect computer to fill up that quick. Having it set to a week also gives users a grace period for their files. If they forget to copy/backup files one day they will still be there the next day (unless it's the next day that the scipt is set to run). The other benifit is that if there is a power bump their files will still be located on the computer once it is turned back on.

 

Please see full article with steps and how to here Deep Freeze Alternative for Mac

 

Thank you

Edited June 5, 2015 by Carter