Greetings,
My grad school is starting a new project to look at how to get user account data (Mac Home folder) transferred from a users old computer to a new computer when the user and the computers are fully remote.
We currently provision all computers on-site, and then ship them to the remote user. The user is then responsible for the transfer of data from the old computer to the new one. This results in a fairly heavy lift for the user and support staff. We're moving towards a low-touch process where the user can initiative the provisioning out of the box, so we're investigating ways to reduce the data transfer load as well.
Apple Migration Assistant is somewhat less than ideal; it's sort of all or nothing (well, not exactly, but it's not great) and we've had many bad experiences with it on managed devices. We use CrashPlan for home folder backup, but it's very slow at restoring folders over a couple gigs in size.
Suggestions? Are there home grown solutions? 3rd party or commercial tools? Experiences?