[alligator]

My father is having a very, very hard time with his Mac. He's managed to corrupt both his address book and iCal so bad that even Apple support can't help him. I'm considering buying a Mac Mini server to see if I can somehow allow him to "remote" into the Mac Mini server from a stripped down Mac at his house to run OS X. This way I can keep the OS up to date, make sure it is backed up, and keep it running right with all the correct updates.

Is this possible? I want to control as much as possible on his machine without allowing him to mess things up any further. Any ideas?

[olePigeon]

Yes. You can set up an OS X Server with NetBoot and use his Mac as a terminal. However, that won't protect him from corrupting his files (however he's doing that.)

I think your best solution is to buy a very large hard drive and make regular backups. Possibly, several hard drives and swap them out. Do a backup on one HDD only once a month, one weekly, and the other is backed up daily. That's what I do at work.

[ibook_steve]

I hope you don't have him with an administrator account. I don't know how he may be corrupting things, but I would think that setting his account as a regular user instead of an admin would help.

Heck, you could even enable parental controls!

Steve

[besson3c]

If you were to run a Mac Mini server from your house, chances are unless you have a really fast connection that accessing it would be noticeably and annoying slow.

[ChrisF]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

If you were to run a Mac Mini server from your house, chances are unless you have a really fast connection that accessing it would be noticeably and annoying slow.

Yeah, even if you were able to get Netboot to work, it would be effectively unusable over the internet. Your best bet is, as ibook_steve suggested, is to have him not run as an administrator. However, since nobody knows what happened to his Address Book and iCal, I think the best bet is to get Time Machine configured on his computer. As unlikely as it is, there's no certainty it isn't a hardware issue causing data loss.

[msuper69]

If it were me, I would get mobileme accounts for myself and my dad. Then I would set up Time Machine for him.

Using Back To My Mac, you can remote in over the Internet and monitor his Mac if he's having problems. Time Machine would make it trivial to restore corruption.

[alligator]

Actually, I do use Time Machine with his computer, and he has MobileMe. All of the backups of the address book and calendar are corrupt in Time Machine, and his computer refuses to sync with MobileMe (under this specific user account) due to the corrupt data. I hate having to tell him that I have no idea how he messed up his computer so much, but at this point I'm also at a loss for how to fix it (as is Apple support!).

[Big Mac]

Hmmm. Maybe some of his RAM is faulty.

[ChrisF]

Originally Posted by Big Mac 

Hmmm. Maybe some of his RAM is faulty.

Yeah, I'd certainly suspect a hardware issue if there is random corrupt data. Try the Apple hardware diagnostics.

[besson3c]

Or memtest86 if the Apple hardware diagnostics don't include thorough RAM checking.