Portable Home Sync stops on large home directories

[mikemchargue]

We’re an advertising shop. We have a fairly high staff to IT ratio, so we rolled out Portable Home Directories over a year ago to simplify the process of implementing new workstations. It’s worked wonderfully.

Our employees are heavy Mail and ITunes users. As a result, it’s not uncommon to have home directories with 20,000, 30,000 or even 50,000 files. We’ve had an ongoing issue where people with large (in terms of numbers of files) home directories will stop during the sync following a synchronization conflict. They don’t crash, the sync just stops and shows the synchronizing dialog indefinitely. It’s not always on the same file, and the logs for MirrorAgent don’t show any error. If you click “Stop” the login or logout completes normally and the person can work, but obviously that means we don’t have current data on the network home.

We’ve been able to resolve the issue by manually copying the files from the local home directory to the network home while the user is logged in, performing a backfround sync of everything but ~/Library and then doing a login/logout sync to sync the full home. Sometimes this process has to be repeated 2 ot 3 times to complete the sync.

The issue is we’ve rolled out several new home directory servers and there are a dozen or so users expereicing the problem. Our current fix is too time consuming to go around doing this by hand, so I’m wondering if anyone out there has had this problem and if you have a more elegant solution. Any guidance would be enormously helpful.

[mikemchargue]

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: MacTroll[/u][p]You’re most likely going to have to refine what you do and do not synch.

It sounds like you’re pushing the limits of the synch engine, so you need to relax that a bit. Either by reducing the synch interval, or reducing what you’re synching. If you’re using IMAP, don’t synch the mail, for example, keep it on the server.[/p][/QUOTE]

I was very afraid that this would be the response. We use IMAP and don’t sync the IMAP folders, but users still have copious amounts of mail filed locally since we have a 1 GB cap on mail boxes.

Is this a matter of “sync less at once?” IE, could I sync ~/Library on login and ~/Music on logout, hence lowering the amount of files synced each time?

[rsaeks]

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: mikemchargue[/u][p][QUOTE][u]Quote by: MacTroll[/u][p]You’re most likely going to have to refine what you do and do not synch.

Is this a matter of “sync less at once?” IE, could I sync ~/Library on login and ~/Music on logout, hence lowering the amount of files synced each time?[/p][/QUOTE]

We took the stance that since users are the ones that buy their iTunes music, and we do not have valid licensing for their music, we do not back it up.

As far as doing part of a synch at login, and another at logout, it is a all or nothing approach with that option in that you can only specify the settings for the “login/logout” synch and not break it down to synch ~/A at login, and ~/B at logout.

You might be able to take your approach and do more “critical” files such as ~/Library, ~/Documents, ~/Desktop at login/logout, and then do ~/Music in the background in addition to the other folders.

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