New computer setup and data transfer.

mstensond49
New Contributor II

Hello all. We are refreshing our Macbook Air line this year and we will be deploying 1500 new Macbook Air laptops to our district teachers. They will be in DEP and utilize Pre-Stage Enrollment for configuration. My question is how have you guys dealt with teacher data transfers to new systems from their old? I'm thinking Thunderbolt to Thunderbolt target disk mode. Thanks

6 REPLIES 6

mstensond49
New Contributor II
 

stevewood
Honored Contributor II
Honored Contributor II

@mstensond49 I've done it using TB to TB in TDM and I've also used rsync over the network when it's not a lot of data. I would sync the user's data to their new machine and then hand them their new machine. But that was not on 1500 machines, that was a lot of 10 or 20 computers over a period of 2 weeks.

moojomoore
New Contributor III

One other way to do this would be to give each teacher an external hard drive to be backing up their computers with Time Machine. This allows for easy data transfers when they get their new computers and also makes them responsible for backing up their own data as they get these new machines.

mariobarrera
New Contributor

The way we do it here in our district is to have them store everything that is important to their Google Drive.

RobertHammen
Valued Contributor II

There are scripts like BackupRestore that can be used to automagically back up content from /Users. Or use rsync, or Google Drive, or CrashPlan, or...

spif_spaceman
New Contributor III

Just my 2 cents here, I would never rely on the teachers to make the backup themselves. There would be several that would put it off and put if off and then they would never have their data. We use CrashPlan PRO and it works very well for about 500 machines in our district.