Apple Configurator Sync Station replication

[Mscheid]

I have successfully used the package manifest in composer to create a dmg and move the app and what looks to be critical settings and files from one computer to another. However, I have not had any success having an iOS device sync to both. The iPad is correctly listed in the configurator of the "cloned" sync station but the iPad is not recognized when plugged in as a managed device and does not sync.

Has anyone had success with this cloning workflow?

[arekdreyer]

Apple Configurator is designed so that an iOS device that is "supervised" by (Apple Configurator) on a given OS X computer will not appear to any other OS X computer until it is unsupervised. I strongly discourage you from trying to work around that restriction; I think your end result will only be frustration.

Rather than focus on the specific solution, let's back up - what exact problems are you trying to solve?

[fredbolden]

It sounds like our problem that we purchased this software for. We would like to create an imaging station with configuration and then close the station to other imaging stations so that four separate machines would be treated by the iOS devices as the same configurator, so that we don't have to bring our 600 iPads back to the same central location for imaging.

[AndyBeaver]

I have had good results restoring different machines with the SAME hardware from Time Machine backups capturing the Apple Configurator database. However this was done in a testing environment, I am still a little nervous to deploy these machines out. For our 5,000+ iPad 1:1 deployment we are sticking to just initially provisioning the devices on separate MacBooks allowing us to have 5 available per Apple ID. We are making TM backups of those stations for redundancy and "JIC"(just in-case). In our case the shear volume of updating that will need to happen drove the idea of creating three more new IDs, (Elementary.Middle, High). This gave us 15 stations. Still not perfect, but we own and retain our VPP apps, and for students over 13 they own their free apps. Lets all hope someday for unauthenticated OTA app updating. Not holding my breath!