Best way to copy accounts, WITH passwords

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Best way to copy accounts, WITH passwords

I'm the administrator for a small university lab (24 computers). There are about a dozen classes that use the lab; each computer has an account for each class (Photography, Marketing, Newspaper, Video, etc.)

We're mass-replacing machines this summer. Yay!

What I used to do was spend a lot of time on one machine. I'd create each account, customize the dock for each, set global preferences, all that dull stuff. Then, I would clone that machine to the next.

Way back when, I did this using Carbon Copy Cloner. CCC stopped working some years back, so I switched to the built in Migration Assistant.

That worked fine for a while. But, somewhere around OS 10.11 or 10.12, Migration Assistant stopped transferring the passwords as part of the accounts. I would have to sit at each computer, and log into each account, providing it with a password. Aside from the humbug factor, that's about 600 chances for me to make a mistake (roughly 300 logins, each with a "confirm the password" prompt).

What I want is to be able to clone the accounts, explicitly including preferences and passwords, from one machine to many others. What's the best way to accomplish that?

Mahalo!

Tom G

Posted on May 29, 2020 4:06 PM

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Answer 1

a brody

Level 10

85,382 points

May 29, 2020 4:40 PM in response to HawaiianHippie

Carbon Copy Cloner works again.

Target Disk Mode is very helpful

Two days after 10.15.5 rendered Carbon Copy Cloner unable to make clones, they issued a patch to solve it.

So do give Carbon Copy Cloner a try again.

Passwords are held in keychains, or you can use 1Password as a password manager.

But cloning is the easiest way, when you have similar content in operating system and user profiles.

If you want an easy to manage group of computers from a server side, https://www.jamf.com offers managed services through their team. I work in a corporate environment where we just deployed 20 Macs, and JAMF was really good at doing that.

We now have them all bound to Active Directory, and are able to establish Active Directory accounts.

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Answer 2

Jun 2, 2020 3:19 PM in response to a brody

What would that workflow look like? It's been many a year since I did it via CCC... I imagine it would go something like this:

Make Computer 1 perfect
Launch Computer 2 in target mode, connected to Computer 1 via Thunderbolt
remotely nuke the HD on Computer 2
Use CCC to create a bootable clone of Computer 1 on Computer 2
Shut down, disconnect.
Turn on Computer 2, and give it a new name (because it now thinks that it, too, is Computer 1)

And this should work with all software in place, right? Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Cloud, etc.

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Answer 3

a brody

Level 10

85,382 points

Jun 2, 2020 6:18 PM in response to HawaiianHippie

Yep, the only problem you might run into is software registered with the network card address of the computer. Those may require you contacting the software vendor to ask them to allow you to transfer the license to the other computer.

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Answer 4

Jun 11, 2020 6:38 PM in response to a brody

It seems to have worked!

I'm a bit surprised at a couple of things. Not all of the preferences I set transferred. For example, I turned off Screen Lock on the original. Particularly in a lab environment, having to enter a password to wake up a machine is just infuriating, so I made extra special double sure to disable it on every account. However, on machines cloned from that original, Screen Lock is on again. I've discovered a few little annoyances like that so far.

However, the bulk of things seem to be doing as expected. Hooray!

Thanks for the help!

Tom G

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Best way to copy accounts, WITH passwords

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