How do you preform user upgrades?

[roethelbc]

Morning,

So we have finally started our Mavericks Upgrades at our University. During this process we have to backup all user data before installing our new image, which currently means backing it up to a network share. I am sure there are better ways to do this, so asking the community, how do you guys preform user upgrades? Just curious.

[JPDyson]

We have an OS X installer package, built with createOSXinstallPkg. We inject First Boot Package Install.pkg, to which we added the Java package installer (ugh) and a payload-free package that disables the iCloud pop-up. This is delivered via a Self Service policy, so the user can do the upgrade on their own time.

They're responsible for their data. This only works if there's an upgrade path from their current OS to the new one, but we scope it even narrower; we limit it to 10.8 only, and only systems where we had the FileVault key in escrow (because reasons). I didn't set out to create an ad for Rich's blog, but that's how this ended up...

[alexjdale]

We either have users self-install the OS from the App Store, or we make the installer available in Self Service (just the installer app, they still have to run it). If a user does not have admin rights I have them work with a support tech for assistance. Anything else I need is in policies scoped to a group that detects the upgrade and takes reactive action, because users can upgrade on their own.

We also make users responsible for their own data, and I am not aware of any incidents of data loss from an upgrade. We also offer a couple different corporate backup options to all users anyway.