Mobile accounts syncing and FileVault

[ToddJob]

Is it possible to sync file vaulted mobile accounts. I know that time machine can only back up a closed vaulted home folder and does not support incremental backups. My fear is that this is true to a synced mobile account.

[Greg Neagle]

They work fine; sync happens at login, in the background while logged in, and at logout. The user’s home directory is mounted and available, and syncs happen normally.

-Greg

[deemery]

Under OS X.5.5 and OS X Server 5.5 this does seem to be working OK for me. It stopped working under X.5.3(?) and came back after a X.5 Server update.

However, it can be slow and fussy. (‘fussy’ in the sense that some things e.g. lockfiles seem to always generate synch errors, and under some circumstances, I’ve had files/folders that I deleted on the mobile account come back because they weren’t deleted on the server.)

All-in-all, I don’t find Mobile account synching to be fully trustworthy. So now I keep a separate backup by having a Synk Pro scheduled application that opens an encrypted disk image of my home directory on an external drive, synch/backups to that disk image (at 4:00 AM every day), then closes the image & dismounts it. This too has been giving me occasional problems, my hope is that a (another!) failed hard drive on my laptop will be able to recover from at least one of these two independent backup methods.

Oh, and my Server now backs itself up to a 1TB external drive. This works for me since I’m only supporting a few accounts and the (old G5 I use as a) server has a total of 1tb (4x500gb drives, RAID-Mirrored into 2x500gb partitions).

dave

[Author]

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