Disable Time Machine

applesupport-ne
New Contributor III

I'm looking to Disable Time Machine on all of our macs. Could someone tell me if this is the correct method? Also does anyone know how to Disable USB WRITE? Via Windows we control this through group policy, anything like this for macs?58fa2d3a95fa4f44800b77e2c711cb7c

3 REPLIES 3

bpavlov
Honored Contributor

@NGKF I would not try to make use of anything under Managed Preferences as Apple is focusing on Configuration Profiles as its replacement. So while it may work, it's not necessarily the best method going forward.

You can upload custom profiles (.mobileconfig files) to the JSS. Use something like [https://github.com/timsutton/mcxToProfile](MCXtoProfiles) to make profiles.

Or create custom profiles in the JSS by creating a new config profile and choosing the Custom payload and uploading a plist with the values you want managed. It won't always work, but it should for the most part.

The Managed Preference page may be a good point to see what the PLISTs are and the values you need. So in this case I imagine if you use the following command in Terminal it would allow you to create a plist that has the values you need:

defaults write com.apple.TimeMachine AutoBackup -bool false

The file would be located in ~/Library/Preferences (where ~ is your home directory). But I like to take it a step further and make sure I have a clean PLIST with only the values I want to manipulate. So I tend to do defaults write to ~/Desktop/com.apple.TimeMachine since I can easily access the file on the desktop and it guarantees the plist file hasn't been written to before.

As for the second question, have you looked at the Configuration Profile - Restrictions Payload. You may be able to get away with restricting access to external media through that. Haven't used it myself but I've seen it so figured I'd mention it.

applesupport-ne
New Contributor III

@bpavlov Thanks for replying I was able to restrict T.M via a configuration profile. As for my second question I found my answer under configuration profile as well "BUT" only work for standard users. One issue I am having is, our marketing team use some free 3rd party software and there really isn't any restriction since they always need something, so I'm trying to figure out a way to keep them as "Standard users" and yet give them the ability to at least install some software.

applesupport-ne
New Contributor III

@bpavlov BTW the link you sent doesn't seem to exist.