Backing up user folders

[mconners]

Hello again Everyone,

I am in the midst of a LOT of planning for our update to El Capitan and the switch over this summer to many new items across our infrastructure.

One of the complex items I am still trying to understand or figure out is what to do with a user's local home folder when I do the update. How are other people backing up their local user folders? What scripts or processes have been used that are tried and true?

For me, I want to have a backup of their data should a drive fail or some other unanticipated event occur.

Thanks again for your awesome feedback and ideas!!

Mick

[thoule]

How do I do backups? You'll get a bunch of answers about that. Some people use Time Machine and some use cloud based. Crashplan always gets a good score. That question is too big; you won't get a decent response by just asking how someone else does backups. Regardless of your El Cap migration, you should have backups anyways! That said, even if an El Cap update goes south, it will unlikely kill the /User directory. -t-

[mconners]

Thanks @thoule, I knew as soon as I hit the post button it was too broad of a question. You are right, it is way to broad of a question to get specific examples or ideas from.

Let me ask a different question on backups. Are you leaving backups in the user hands rather than your Mac admin hands. In other words, users are responsible for their own backups?

Maybe that is the better question. I know backups are critical and my time machine is running everyday I am plugged into the drive. How our users are doing it is another story.

Mick

[mm2270]

Where I am we provide a company cloud (or server) based backup solution that they can install out of Self Service. Its not the most wonderful tool, and the team that manages it has what many feel are too many file type restrictions on what it can back up, so it ends up missing a lot of stuff that most clients would want backed up. But its something at least.
Other than that, we kind of leave it up to the users to back up their own data. As part of our El Capitan upgrade, the Self Service policy will alert them that its their responsibility to make sure they have a good and current backup of their most important data (just in case). The upgrade is optional, so if they get scared, they can cancel and go back and make sure they capture a backup of their stuff.

Other than using some of the commercial tools out there (Todd already mentioned CrashPlan, which does get high marks) you probably won't find too many homegrown backup solutions. Its certainly possible to script backups using mounted shares and rsync, etc. but that gets very trick and isn't easy to keep from breaking, so I probably wouldn't go down that route.

[stevewood]

@mconners I utilize CrashPlan here, and before that it was Retrospect. We only backup our laptop users (which is close to 100% of our fleet now), and we do not leave it up to them. CrashPlan is installed so that it starts backing up the user's home folder right away.

I think if your organization decides to leave it up to the end user, you should have a written policy that states that, and is very clear that your IT organization is not responsible for data loss. Or if your org is going to provide a backup solution, like a CrashPlan, that a written policy is done that states what is being backed up. We, for example, do not back up MP3 files and some other things.

Hope that helps.