Backing Up Profiles

[Gongalong]

Hi folks,

 

We have a classroom of 2017 Intel iMacs running the latest MacOS they can (13). The disks are full, mostly with system data, and despite several attempts I cannot identify what it is or how to clear it (including using a trial of an app that's supposed to clear unnecessary data). Anyway, I have tried rebuilding one of the iMacs and that has cleared whatever the data is (I suspect historic Logic installs that haven't cleaned up after themselves). Before rebuilding the iMacs I need to backup the profiles of students that are doing exams, which are only one or two profiles per machine. I managed to do this on the first machine using disk utility to save it all to a DMG file, although I can't remember if I was logged on as the user or not. I have tried on several of the remaining machines while logged on as local admin using disk utility, and also just a straight folder/file copy, and get an error that suggests I don't have permission. I have gone to the root of the user's profile folder, ensured I have read/write access, and also ensured that's applied to "enclosed items". I still get a permission error.

 

My next idea is to get hold of some of the student logins and test with their login, but anyone know why I'm still getting a permission error when I should have access to the profile? Do I have to use terminal and CHMOD (if the correct command) to ensure I have permissions on every file and folder within the profile?

 

Thanks

[Gongalong]

As follow up, I found that I can only easily copy profiles as the user. For some reason, in some user profiles under Music\Audio Music Apps there's a file or folder buried somewhere that even the user cannot copy, as it gives an error. So I found that to backup some profiles I had to exclude that folder. (I had also tried using CHMOD to grab ownership of everything, and that still didn't help)

[Brimstone]

Time Machine (free) will back up both user account data (if you want this) and user created content but you need a Mac and some storage for the back up to do this

[Gongalong]

Thanks. None of these are time machine-d, mostly beacuse they are setup for students to save to their network folder.