Students with Managed Apple ID's restoring from personal backup

njablonski
New Contributor

Hey everyone,

We're running into an issue where students who are on managed apple id's (and who are not given access to the app store) are restoring from a personal backup, which then downloads apps they are not supposed to have. This is creating a whole host of apple id conflicts with prepurchased books and other schoolwork, and obviously we'd rather they didn't have access to this.

We would prefer not to remove the option to restore from backup because it's helpful to us when there is an issue or lost work, as the managed id's have 200 gbs of storage and that has been a useful tool in the past. Any ideas on how to prevent the personal id restores?

3 REPLIES 3

thejenbot
Contributor III

Not so much to prevent it, but maybe this will help? If you don't have "Prevent user from enabling Activation Lock" checked in your PreStage enrollment, you can create a Smart Group that notifies you when Activation Lock is enabled for that PreStage. So then if someone signs in to iCloud with a personal Apple ID, which enables Activation Lock, you get an email alert. When this happens at our school I know that the student has done what I've told them not to do, and I refer it to administration for discipline. We also wipe the iPad and make them start from scratch...

bcampbell
Contributor
where students who are on managed apple id's (and who are not given access to the app store) are restoring from a personal backup, which then downloads apps they are not supposed to have

Also, you can create a Smart Device Group that picks up any students who have installed apps that are not in your app catalog. If you enable "Send email notification on membership change", you will get notified via email when inventory has picked up that a non-authorized app has been installed. You can also use that Smart Group in other ways such as making it the scope of a very restrictive configuration profile that would limit iPad use to the point where seeking help is required. We don't do that as we don't want IT to become the diciplinarians since there are other professionals for whom that's a main part of their job nor do we want to automatically disable an iPad from student use possibly causing an excuse for not doing homework. However, I do use automated mangement in that Smart Group to change the lock screen and home screen to a big red banner that reminds the student (and anyone else who see's their iPad such as their classroom teachers) that unauthorized apps are installed.

RDowson
New Contributor III

We have this exact same issue.

We would love it if we could only allow Managed Apple IDs to sign into or restore to a managed iPad.

Failing that, it looks like the only option is to disable the ability to restore from backup and then manually enable it when required but this is a massive overhead for us.