Home Sync - Mobile Account - Skip Items

Did you verify that the profile is getting appled to the user? (System Preferences -> Profiles)

I've seen it take a login/logout for Mobile sync settings to update.

What is your profile settings. The more info you can provide the more likely you'll get some help.

I'm having the same issue. I just set up a network user with portable home directories, but even on the first sync it it ignored all of the "skip items" rules (including the default ones). I know the profile is getting applied, because other changes, such as # of minutes between syncs and "Sync Folders", are applied.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

I was also thinking the the skip rules were being ignored, but I'm starting to wonder if the Home Sync Status dialog is bit misleading in that it checks everything in ~/, and reflects that in the dialogue, but only actually syncs according to the rules.

I've seen the dialogue suggesting that it's syncing large files from folders that it shouldn't be but completing them in far quicker a time than I'd expect.

At least in my case, the skip rules are definitely not applied. Some of my documents were deleted as a result of the skip rule bug (luckily I was able to rescue them from the trash). Doesn't seem to me that PHDs are fully baked...

A good first step is to use System Profiler to open up a System Report on the workstation. Down the left column, under Software is a section for Managed Client if you're doing this via Workgroup Manager, or Profiles if you're doing it via Profile Manager.

Check to see if your directives are listed here correctly to first ascertain if the directives are actually reaching your workstations.

Cheers for the advice Jaydisc. I've checked that and in my home sync, for example, I have locally /~ still listed as a path despite Workgroup Manager only specifying ~/Documents and ~/Desktop.

I'm also getting constant Sync errors with iCloud -tef files, the skip items list exlcudes these using an "ends with" match and that is reflected locally in the System Report but they still error on every background sync and when logging out of a workstation. I'm having sufficient problems with iCloud reliability that I'm going to stop using it anyway which might solve that particular issue, but I'd like to get my head around why Home Sync seems particularly problematic.

PHD (Portable Home Directories) is no longer further developed from my point of view. The development seased a few years ago and it still has the same bugs and issues as in the 10.6.8 snow leopard days)
I wouldn't rely to much on PHD and I would forget it if I were you. It doesn't support iPhoto libraries nor APerture libs and so many other files from different apps, that if I use it somewhere, I only sync a few folders like Desktop and Documents and I apply these settings in the client and sync those only during login and/or logout (desktop vs laptop) so that I'm sure that they're closed, to avoid errors. Years ago I suppressed these errors but that doesn't work anymore.

Disable also background sync and set it to 'manual' as it will give you headaches. Forget that you can configure Mail.app and that those prefs will automatically be synced : you've to configure them at every workstation you log in. I can you give you a lot of examples but IMHO PHD's are dead

Are you sure you're not comparing BackgroundSync with PreferencesSync for ~/? Are you happy to paste your rules?

I would excluse the entire ~/Library/Mobile Documents folder, as that is the iCloud sync storage, which is already syncing. Double syncing is often bad.

I checked the system profiler, and all the sync exceptions are displaying as they should, so the rules are definitely getting pushed to the client.

At least on my end, I'm not syncing ~/ at all (only select subfolders). I've gone the route of only including the specific subfolders that I want to sync (rather than excluding those that I don't want to sync). It's a pain and if I make a new folder I'll have to update my sync rules, so definitely not an ideal solution. When I have time I think I'll revert to local accounts and just use Google Drive for sharing docs.

I've just tried transitioning a few users from Managed Client settings to Profile Manager settings for Mobile, aka Portable Home Folders, and I completely concur... the skip lists are completely ignored. The include lists seem to work, so instead of syncing ~, and skipping ~/Music, ~/Movies, and ~/Pictures, if I just set it to sync ~/Documents and ~/Desktop, that worked, but even the most obvious default skip items like ~/.Trash and ~/Library/Caches were just ignored....

This had worked previously, so I'm inclined to think this is a 10.8.2 / OS X Server 2.2 regression bug. I'll be installing 2.2.1 on my test environment this weekend and see if it's any better there.

I'm having the same problem and just wondered on the off chance did anyone find a solution to the excluions being ignored?

The work around of only syncing the required folders would work for me but we use Office so I don't really want to include the whole Documents Folder and not exclude the Microsoft Data Folder.

It's frustrating as we've had PHD's and home syncing working pretty well from 10.5 to 10.7 via MCX and OD but would like to start to move towards configuration profiles with 10.8.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Same issue here. Is there no fix for this? I have three Mavericks servers with 300 10.8.5 clients using PHD, all the exceptions are ignored, also, no matter what you do, you cannot omit the trash folder. It always gets synced, even if you remove all the rules and don't specify anything! This is a big problem with bandwidth when you have 200+ users at the same time forgetting to empty their trash and syncing gigabytes of data to the Home directory :-(... Apple I cant believe your attitude to your enterprise users.

Make sure you are entering your items to be skipped that you do it in both the Preference Sync options and Home Sync options. With the stock configuration I needed duplicate entries in both.

However, running Server 3.0.2 I can no longer edit the paths (another documented issue) to fine tune the operation so it really doesn't matter at this point. I'm hosed no matter what. I swear, as soon as I find a workaround for one thing Apple introduces something new to frustrate me with.

Dave, seems as though you are using profile manager to deploy this, I am using workgroup manager, profile manager was just a mess for me.

I have just had a look through the sync logs on a 10.8.5 client. It seems the inclusions and exclusions are being read, however as part of the cleanup process, the file paths are being normalised. When this command is run, the normalised path does not keep the case. The absolute path then no longer matches the actual path on the client and the exclusions are ignored. Now I'm no programmer, so this may be a normal function, anybody?