My main system: Hackintosh -- core i5 / 32GB RAM / GTX680, 2 x 250GB SSD, 2x 60GB SSD, 6 x 3TB 7.2K drive. (The handy thing here is my hackintosh build runs the vanilla kernel and I patch all my kexts at runtime so all the binaries are stock -- thus the backups are portable). This is my workstation and it's primarily a single-user system but there is the occasional remote user login. I use this same setup on all my macs though, and this is how it works:
1 60GB SSD for the OS, applications, and caches
X number of SSDs (usually 256GB), one for each user
The 60GB OS SSD is filevaulted with a password known to all users, so the disk is FDE'd while any of us can boot it. Each user SSD is filevault encrypted with their personal key. Each user is assigned a bash alias to mount their drive (So you can paste keys if you're using pubkeys with secure entry):
maroch='diskutil cs unlockVolume <logicalvolumeid>' ##mount aroch's home directory
And there's the associated fstab entry
/Volumes/aroch /Users/aroch hfs rw,bind 0 0
The "root" account is an admin account setup much the same way but but it is just an encrypted DMG and is mounted at boot using launchd and a hardware dongle as the password. If no dongle is present, there's a non-admin account with a real homedir that can also be used to elevate into an admin shell
The 60GB backup SSD (in slot #4): An install of (now) OSX Mavericks that includes my standard set of homebrew installs, xcode and the ~20 applications I use daily + Arq. It also has the a backup of my fstab and the root account DMG. There's a daily cron that copies my personal dotfiles to it as well. There's a weekly cron that reboots the workstation into the backup SSD and there's a startup script on the backup SSD that checks for system updates /MAS updates, applies them, Arq backup (Takes ~10mins usually) and then reboots back into the main OS SSD. The files total about 17GB right now but the delta is usually less than 100mb.
If needed, the OS and settings can be restored with Arq by using the backup SSD's vault
sounds like an awesome setup. So in theory you could restore your backup system drive from the workstation to a laptop as you are running the vanilla kernel ? How would one do that in practice ? I was thinking about a way to sync my workstation and Laptop in an easy way on a system level at night/morning..would something like this work for that ?
EG using the nightly system drive image of the workstation and clone it to the laptop in the morning ?
Yes, in fact I have restored from my workstation to my mac mini and MBP in the past. Closing across two drives daily is probably not worth it. You'd be better off rsync / rdiff over your local network
My main system: Hackintosh -- core i5 / 32GB RAM / GTX680, 2 x 250GB SSD, 2x 60GB SSD, 6 x 3TB 7.2K drive. (The handy thing here is my hackintosh build runs the vanilla kernel and I patch all my kexts at runtime so all the binaries are stock -- thus the backups are portable). This is my workstation and it's primarily a single-user system but there is the occasional remote user login. I use this same setup on all my macs though, and this is how it works:
The 60GB OS SSD is filevaulted with a password known to all users, so the disk is FDE'd while any of us can boot it. Each user SSD is filevault encrypted with their personal key. Each user is assigned a bash alias to mount their drive (So you can paste keys if you're using pubkeys with secure entry): And there's the associated fstab entry The "root" account is an admin account setup much the same way but but it is just an encrypted DMG and is mounted at boot using launchd and a hardware dongle as the password. If no dongle is present, there's a non-admin account with a real homedir that can also be used to elevate into an admin shellThe 60GB backup SSD (in slot #4): An install of (now) OSX Mavericks that includes my standard set of homebrew installs, xcode and the ~20 applications I use daily + Arq. It also has the a backup of my fstab and the root account DMG. There's a daily cron that copies my personal dotfiles to it as well. There's a weekly cron that reboots the workstation into the backup SSD and there's a startup script on the backup SSD that checks for system updates /MAS updates, applies them, Arq backup (Takes ~10mins usually) and then reboots back into the main OS SSD. The files total about 17GB right now but the delta is usually less than 100mb.
If needed, the OS and settings can be restored with Arq by using the backup SSD's vault