Backups
Overview
We provide backup service on a best effort basis, and make no guarantees regarding data recovery. It is the user's responsibility to make copies of important data. We suggest copying to a variety of media, to reduce the risk of a single point of failure. We provide a CD/DVD writer and will assist users as required.
Snapshots
Our file server supports snapshots. If a file was in your directory when a snapshot was taken, you should be able to recover it, whether you accidentally deleted it, or simply modified it and would like to revert to a previous version.
$ ls .snapshot hourly.0 hourly.2 hourly.4 nightly.0 nightly.2 nightly.4 weekly.0 hourly.1 hourly.3 hourly.5 nightly.1 nightly.3 nightly.5 weekly.1
Assuming the file has been around for a while, the most recent version is in hourly.0, and the oldest copy is in weekly.1
For example, to see what copies of ~/hw/lab1.txt are available from different times in the past:
cd ~/hw/.snapshot ls -l */lab1.txt
To recover a file, simply copy it from the .snapshot directory:
cp .snapshot/nightly.0/lab1.txt lab1_recovered.txt
Offline Backups
We back up user home directories nightly. Directories with names of the form *.NOBACKUP are not backed up. You can help ease the strain on our poor tape drive by putting large files you do not need backed up in such directories. Various temporary directories, such as web browser caches, may not be backed up. Please don't store important data in /tmp or /var/tmp without a personal backup plan, as we do not copy them to tape, and machines fail regularly.
If you need a file restored from before the oldest snapshot, please fill out our File Restoration Request form. We may be able to recover the file from tape.
We do not hold any data for more than one year.