Shared iMac Lab Backup

[_techie_]

Hi.

 

We have a classroom suite of iMacs that are bound to the domain.

Safe to say most settings for students are applied, and the system is mostly reliable and we have a good handle on MDM setup (using Mosyle).

 

Upon login for students their home drive is mapped, dock is set and system appropriately locked down.

My main issue is backing up of students iMovie Library projects and media. Even if I had sufficient server space on the Home Drive SMB shares (Windows Server NTFS Shares), the iMovie project runs so badly across the network, the application is unusable.

Aside from putting in symbolic links for documents, downloads, and desktop, I still can't really use move the iMovie Library files, as they are too

 

I have investigated using Apple school accounts and enabling iCloud drive, but this doesn't back up the iMovie Libraries (as far as I am aware). Not too sure how well this works in a shared lab environment either.

 

Any real solutions out there (or just use something else, other than iMovie?)

 

Thanks

Mark

[geohanson]

What we’ve done in the past with Logic X projects is have the iMac HDD/SSD partitioned into two, so there is a local partition on each device. The students then download their project from a NAS to the local partition, do their work, then copy it back.

 

Even with a high speed NAS on a gigabit connection, I think you’d still struggle editing big projects directly off the network.

[tsutton]

Yes, editing large projects over network is not good. What we have done was to have 2nd partition called 'Data' and let the students copy the files from NAS to this, and edit from there. Once done, they copy the project back to the NAS box. We have warning on the wallpaper to remind them to backup all the time as the data on the LOCAL drive will be wiped. So far, no issue.

[Brimstone]

If you want to backup multiple Macs why not use Time Machine...?