We're testing the following process to see if we can force a user's local computer will copy back to their home folder remotely. Been working with an Apple rep on this and we were successful in doing this on a test account. Please backup before you try this.
Read on for more…
Brief background on why we did this and it may help you. We didn't
take care of Managed Prefs in good admin spirits. We forgot to exclude
Entourage database during background sync, didn't exclude media files
outside of their respective folders, etc.. Running out of space on our
RAIDS, we needed to go through user folders, delete the contents, and
force a downsync from the local computer to their remote home folder,
with the new exclusion list in place excluding those file hogs. Please
use at your own risk, but this is a valuable need to know.
- On
the backend in Managed Prefs for the user, turn off background and
login/logout synchs, make changes to any of the ignored files you want
in login/logout and background. In our case, we added VMWare image,
Entourage, media files, etc.. -
Log out the user.
-
Log them back in.
-
Backup the home folder to a safe spot.
-
Mount the user's remote home folder.
-
Blow away all of the contents in the user's remote folder.
-
On the client's local computer, go to ~/Library/Preferences and delete com.apple.homeSync.plist.
-
Go up a directory to ~/Library and go into the folder Mirrors, delete the randomly named folder inside of that.
-
Log out of the users account on their computer.
-
Go back and enable the login/logout and background synch in Managed Prefs .
-
Log them back in.
11.
You will be prompted with the dialog stating major differences have
been noticed between your local computer and the remote one. It will
prompt to use Local Home, Remote Home, or Sync Later.
- Choose Local Home.
-
The synch dialog will start and the ignored rules will apply.
-
When the synch is complete, see if the user's data is there locally(it should be).
15.
Open the user's remote home folder and look at the contents you should
see an exact replica of the user's local home in the folder minus the
ignored rules we implemented.
Hope this helps and I encourage feedback as I'll need it before I roll it out to my company.
by 
We’ve stayed clear of using Home Sync due to the problems you’re having. I’m not about to let my users choose which data is the correct version and potentially have them overwrite their good data. I would like to see a way that I can always force the local to overwrite the server version, but Apple hasn’t come through with that yet. Until then, we’ll use Chronosync, which gives us the granular control needed to make sure good data doesn’t get overwritten. As long as our users keep their password up to date, it works just fine.
There are other hints showing how to do this, (involving ditto and target disk mode)
Could I use something like this to push files up to my server, from local accounts?
In leopard I can just tell a local user to bind as a user listed in my OD server.
My task is moving 35 people to portable homes, and I’d like to just bind them and push up the files, but don’t know if I can. This is a Tiger/Local to Leopard/PHD move.
Any ideas?