Mobile Accounts on laptops losing users' files

[iSteve]

Hello,

 

We have some staff users on laptops which are running 10.9.5 They are set up with Apple's "Mobile Accounts" so that their home folders synchronise with the network to enable use offline / at home. We've run this way for a long time, and it worked fine.

 

Recently we moved from hosting home folders on a HFS formatted XServe running 10.6.8, to a Windows 2008 R8 box formatted with NTFS. Since then we have seen that some mobile account users are losing some files. The symptom will be:

 

-User notices some, random files are not on their laptop anymore

-User logs in to a normal desktop Mac or PC and the files are there.

-Time passes, and the file vanishes from the server completely, i.e. it is not available from the desktop machine

 

It's almost as if the files are missing from the laptop and Mobile Accounts, and the laptop "correctly" synchronises, removing them from the network, however they shouldn't have vanished from the laptop in the first place.

 

Has anyone experienced this? Is anyone running Mobile Accounts with Windows based home folders?

Are there any alternatives to using Mobile Accounts for laptop file synchronisation?

 

Any advice welcome.