How do you transfer user data in a hybrid low-touch world?

[pbenware1]

Greetings,

My grad school is starting a new project to look at how to get user account data (Mac Home folder) transferred from a users old computer to a new computer when the user and the computers are fully remote.

We currently provision all computers on-site, and then ship them to the remote user.  The user is then responsible for the transfer of data from the old computer to the new one.  This results in a fairly heavy lift for the user and support staff.  We're moving towards a low-touch process where the user can initiative the provisioning out of the box, so we're investigating ways to reduce the data transfer load as well.

Apple Migration Assistant is somewhat less than ideal; it's sort of all or nothing (well, not exactly, but it's not great) and we've had many bad experiences with it on managed devices.  We use CrashPlan for home folder backup, but it's very slow at restoring folders over a couple gigs in size.

Suggestions?  Are there home grown solutions?  3rd party or commercial tools?  Experiences?

[AJPinto]

I have yet to find a really "clean" solution aside of using tools like OneDrive. SMB based solutions are sloppy due to authentication needs, and everything else is consumer focused like Migration Assistant, Time Machine and flash drives. 

Configuring something like OneDrive or Box to sync user data is fairly hands off once configured. Technically iCloud also falls into this bucket but has very poor enterprise controls. All of these options are also cloud based and have a cost consideration.

[sdagley]

@pbenware1 My org makes use of OneDrive like @AJPinto mentions, but with OneDrive's automatic replication being limited to a user's Desktop and Documents folders it's pretty limited.

Druva is a tool I've heard good things about from other Mac Admins, but I don't have any personal experience to recommend it.

There is also the recently released open source tool from the Mac@IBM team called IBM Data Shift which looks very interesting. It supports migration of user data as well as applications via Thunderbolt or Wi-Fi connected Macs, and is designed to work with Jamf Pro. The major obstacle to using this one is that you have to build a version of the app customized for your org, but the Wiki for the project has detailed instructions on that process. Credit to @TechTrekkie for his post on the Mac Admins Slack for making me aware of this tool.