We image our Macs with a partition for the System data & another for the User data.
That, in turn, allows us to image the Macs preserving the user data.
Except the permissions will be incorrect on the home folders, for our solution to this, see below.
Contents
Solution
The solution is the below linked script.
It will loop through /Users/ & attempts to get the UniqueID (locally then from the domain) for each user account it finds, if a User Account is found then the home folders permissions are propagated correctly. Else the permissions are set to read write for all.