Migrating home folders during re-imaging

[#1]

Hello all,

Would some of you share your process for re-imaging end-users' machines? I am doing a big upgrade this summer and although we have a policy that users are responsible for their own data and need to save everything on the network, and not their hard drives… you know where this is going. Higher Ed… my faculty/staff members are AD users and I bind them using ADmitMac and make them admin of their machines, and control other things via MCX. I hate hearing whining… and I just want to offer them a solution that works, so that they are back up-and-running quickly after a re-imaging. So, say, they have their 10.5 machine set up exactly how they want it and I go and re-image it with my 10.6 image… now they moan and groan about the hours it takes to get themselves back up-and-running the way they were. Time Machine backs up the /Users/networkuser (when they login, their mobile account uses the local home folder with the same name as their network login id) but when I re-image the machine and use Migration Assistant, only the two local admin accounts are even an option to restore. I can't figure it out. Anyone have a solution that I am totally missing here?

Short of having them back up their home folder manually (or via time machine) and manually copying it over and repairing permissions after the fact, does anyone have a smoother way of navigating this whole process?

THANK YOU in advance. :)

-lauren

lauren nicholas
User Support & Technology Analyst – Hurd Campus
Center for Information Technology
Moravian College
610 861 1633

[nessts]

I have a userdata partition that mounts at /Users/ then re-image the OS partition, data stays there after re-imaging.

--
Todd Ness
Technology Consultant/Non-Windows Services
Americas Regional Delivery Engineering
HP Enterprise Services

[bentoms]

How do you mount it at /Users?

Regards,

Ben.

[nessts]

LABEL=UserData /Users hfs rw 1 0

put that in /private/etc/fstab, I think you need tabs in the white space between each element on the line

--
Todd Ness
Technology Consultant/Non-Windows Services
Americas Regional Delivery Engineering
HP Enterprise Services

[#5]

I recently posted the migrate.sh script I used for our refresh. It basically automates the process of copying the home folder and fixing permissions. Let me know if you want me to repost it.

[tlarkin]

When Casper imaging runs it mounts the CasperShare, so I would write a
script that archives all the current home directories pre image script
and then post image script it copies them back and verifies
ownership/permission, along with the accounts that were on the machine.

Then last line of script would delete the temp directories on the
CasperShare where the data was temporarily stored.

[rockpapergoat]

you might want to check these scripts written for deploystudio.

https://github.com/rustymyers/BackupRestore

[#8]

Here's the email I posted.