Procedure Question

[mbuckner]

I work at a school, and when one of our teacher/student computers is down, I’d like to get them back up as soon as possible. Right now, I have a teacher macbook that needs to be reimaged. My normal procedure is to backup his data, then reimage the laptop, then copy the data back to the macbook. This procedure normally takes a couple of hours. Is there a better way to do this?

One of my thoughts is to pull his hard drive, put an already imaged drive in, copy his data over and be done. Are there any drawbacks/gotchas to this approach?

Thanks for your help!
Mark Buckner
Bridgeport ISD

[donmontalvo]

Am I reading this right? Casper can do user state migration?

Don

[tlarkin]

Can you set up portable home directories? Then set it to sync say the
documents folder? That is what we do. We give every student and
teacher 200 to 400 megs (depending on the need) of home folder space on
the servers. This is typically sufficient to back up all user data
documents. Anything that they don't need for school like their pictures
and their music is not backed up. When they log into any Mac, it will
sync their documents.

[#4]

There is an option in Casper imaging tool to not erase the hard drive when imaging. At our school when a system needs reimaged, we just uncheck the erase hard drive option and it retains all user data. Makes the process nice and quick.

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[stevewood]

The option I use now is to split the drive into two partitions. User data
goes on one, the system and apps on the other. Then if I need to re-image I
don't have to worry about the user data being touched at all.

Of course, if you have to replace the hard drive, that is a different story.

Steve Wood
Director of IT
swood at integer.com

The Integer Group | 1999 Bryan St. | Ste. 1700 | Dallas, TX 75201
T 214.758.6813 | F 214.758.6901 | C 940.312.2475

[#6]

when imaging. At our school when a system needs reimaged, we just
uncheck the erase hard drive option and it retains all user data. Makes
the process nice and quick.

I figured this out by mistake one day. If you tell it not to erase it
will just overwrite the installed files with whatever version is in your
image. It caused me to mangle a machine but it did appear to hold onto
any file that doesn't get installed as part of the image you're pushing
down.

- JD