Enterprise sync and share with Jamf?

abnaau
New Contributor III

Our Windows-side of the business has been transitioning from SMB home folders to OneDrive - for everything..
I quickly discovered that symlinking macOS Documents, Desktop and Pictures to OneDrive was a complete disaster and even without that, moving the Mac users' file share home folders to OneDrive would fail miserably when the user in question had more than a few GB of data. OneDrive is completely broken over 100GB - even with all conflicts solved it still ends up in an infinite sync loop, throttles and .... data loss ensues. Good enough for simple sync n' share but horrible for bulk data storage.

So... By the look of it we're stuck with SMB file shares for a while longer but 2020 has made it clear that on prem file shares are horribly inconvenient for working remotely.

Users like their files automatically syncing to a safe location on the fly without thinking about it.
Users like having all their bulk data available all the time without thinking about where to save it.
Users don't like it when their whole sync breaks randomly because they started a file name with a blank space :(

I'm not completely put off by the idea of sync'ing local homes from /Users/ to smb:// with rsync in a bash script that verifies the connection to the file share but that's not exactly an enterprise ready solution.

I'm considering iCloud but our legal team has made it clear that GDPR and security will make that take years. Not really considering crashplan or similar because it's simply not in the budget... for Mac's.

Are there any good and mass deployable solutions that'll let us sync local home folders to SMB file shares when available? Maybe with a nice GUI that'll let the user know when something isn't working as intended?
What do you use for sync and share? What do you use for backup?

1 REPLY 1

sdagley
Esteemed Contributor II

@abnaau I definitely would not attempt to put a home folder into OneDrive, but speaking as someone who has close to 400GB of data in OneDrive, it does work with >100GB. You do have to watch out for sync errors, and the fact that there is currently no API to provide the current sync status of a system is a huge shortcoming, as is the lack of a Mac equivalent to the Known Folder Move feature on Windows.