Network homes and Apple’s Pro Apps

Wow, what a headache this subject has caused me over the years. Right from iMovie 10, where Apple introduced the iMovie Library, then soon after introduced it to Garageband, Logic and Final Cut.

At the time of writing, I worked in an education environment, where Network Homes are core to the setup of our staff and student accounts this caused all matter of stress, as Libraries must be stored locally… or does it?

Sort of. You can trick MacOS to into thinking that the ‘Movies’ path is Local, by using a sparse bundle… and that’s what I did.

Creating a custom logon script that relies on hdiutil , outset and MySides to mount a sparse bundle to the common media directories, then creating Symlinks to ‘seamlessly’ trick the apps into saving the files onto the network share… again, sort of.

Here’s the flow…

Heres how I use the script

• Install MySides
• Install Outset
• Run this script on every logon using Outset

Here’s the script!

Compatibility

This script has been used in a production environment up until MacOS Catalina. it has not yet been tested on MacOS 11 Big Sur