Enterprise Hardware Upgrade Adventures

[KUguardgrl13]

Hey all! If this is the wrong sub forum, feel free to redirect this to the right place.

Anyway, I’m a paraeducator working for a school district that runs mostly Apple devices. Most of the teachers have been issued a MacBook Air. IT is in the process of upgrading some of the older MBA’s from 2014, and my co-teacher’s was one of them. She’s a wonderful teacher, but tech is not her area. She’s apparently been storing four years of files locally. I’m not actually sure if there’s a server to save to, though I would think there would be. IT was advising teachers to save their files to Google Drive to prepare for the upgrade. I assumed that would take ages to to, so I suggested a Time Machine backup instead. Making the backup on a flash drive was easy enough.

Monday was the day for the old MBA to be exchanged for the new one. The IT guy got the new MBA registered, and I attempted to use Migration Assistant to restore the files, not even thinking to just drag and drop the important things. It seemed to be running fine, but I came in the next day to find out that the IT guy had balked at completing the Time Machine restore and instead supposedly moved everything using Google Drive. Of course we discovered today that things like the Photos library and Excel files didn’t get moved, and a lot of the apps are throwing up errors.

So I guess my question is, how should this upgrade have gone? Would there have been a way to use Google Drive and ensure that everything was restored to how it was on the old MBA? Would Time Machine with (or without) Migration Assistant worked if it’d been allowed to complete? Honestly I’m a little shocked that IT guys working in an almost exclusive Apple environment aren’t familiar with a pretty necessary part of the OS. Or am I just that ignorant about how an enterprise environment differs from home use?

 

[DJLC]

I'm in charge of IT for a mostly-Mac school. Here's what I probably would've done:

1. Take MacBook Air out of the box
2. Hand it over to you / other teacher to do a Time Machine restore
3. Let the Device Enrollment Program automatically install all my "IT stuff" and settings. I literally have no need to physically touch the machine at all.

The thing about Macs in the enterprise is that they just work. If IT is mucking around that much and has an issue with Time Machine, they really don't have any business supporting Macs in the enterprise IMO.

 

[belvdr]

I would have simply copied the user data to an external drive then copied it back to the new machine. This process is OS agnostic.

Macs in the enterprise have their own quirks.

 

[hobowankenobi]

TM restore is easiest.

There are other ways, such as manually copying the entire user directory (home folder) over to the new machine...but that has a few other steps an admin has to jump through, including resetting permissions.

I expect Google drive would work fine too, if if the grabbed the entire user directory.


Sounds like the IT staff if just overly dictatorial, and a bunch of know-it-alls...which is to say they know less than they think they know.

I can say that, as I work in IT.

 

[satcomer]

TM restore is easiest.

There are other ways, such as manually copying the entire user directory (home folder) over to the new machine...but that has a few other steps an admin has to jump through, including resetting permissions.

I expect Google drive would work fine too, if if the grabbed the entire user directory.


Sounds like the IT staff if just overly dictatorial, and a bunch of know-it-alls...which is to say they know less than they think they know.

I can say that, as I work in IT.

The problem in IT they usually just know Windows support files and don’t understand or support of Mac and Linux support!

 

[hobowankenobi]

The problem in IT they usually just know Windows support files and don’t understand or support of Mac and Linux support!

Sadly true.

This is changing for sure, but the Old Guard is still out there. Lurking.

I don't mind if folks don't know and say so. The worst is when they bluff or pretend, cuz they think they are supposed to know everything. This sounds like one of those situations.

 

[guzhogi]

I work in IT in my school district. We used to back up to a server or a hard drive, set up the new computer, login to the new computer as the teacher, and transfer everything onto the new computer. Now, instead of a server, we boot the old computer into target disk mode, connect it to the new laptop via ThunderBolt, and copy the files over. Since all of our computers have SSDs, it goes fairly quickly. A bit tedious, because we have to copy everything from one folder (eg Desktop, Documents, etc.) at a time. Copying the entire user folder at once tends to lead to problems in my experience.