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jscooper22

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 8, 2013
255
612
Syracuse, NY
Hi,

I maintain a few dozen Macs, mostly MBPs. For years, I've used monolithic deployment: a base machine set up exactly how I want, use CCC to copy the drive to a new machine, spend about 10 minutes tweaking the settings and good to go. I've recently been urged (strongly) by Apple to drop this in favor of MDM, which I hate (mainly because the whole profiles thing doesn't do what I'd like: I'd like to SEE where the icons will go, what size, order of things in the dock, desktop picture, the effect of various settings, etc). Having every machine set up exactly how I would like, at least to start, has been a huge time and headache saver.

Anyway, I finally relented because I assumed that Catalina would simply not allow it due to the system being on a different "pseudo-drive," the T2 (T-something?) chip, etc. But I found that Migration Assistant seems to work pretty well. Is there some reason I can't use it?: Use Migration Assistant too copy a "master" machine, change the username and a few other settings, and hand it over? What am I missing? Is Migration Assistant being depreciated too at some point?

Thanks,

Jeff

ps Didn't MacRumors used to have some sort of SysAdmin forum?
 
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