Backups

Policy

Backups are run as follows:

• Weekly starting Friday night: /nfs/home/
• Quarterly on the first day of the quarter: /nfs/db, /nfs/store
• Never: /nfs/work, Laptops, Desktops
• No other user files are backed up, ever, unless by special request and agreed by email exchange.
• You are encouraged to use a USB drive on your desktop or laptop for supplemental backups of key files.
• You may copy files from laptop, desktop, instrument machines or elsewhere to your /nfs/home or /nfs/store directories. You may use CrashPlan or rsync for this.

We have four savepacks that we rotate for /nfs/home. We set aside one of these savepacks quarterly, on the first backup of the quarter, as an offsite backup. Thus at any time there is a weekly backup made starting Friday night for the last four weeks, and a quarterly backup for the last four quarters.

Note

At time of writing, this policy is only implemented on Cluster 2. Cluster 1 starts May 1, 2014 and Cluster 0 starts June 1, 2014 (with caveats).

Restore

To have files restored from backup, please write to the sysadmins, stating file/directory name, the approximate time of when it was created in the form you want restored and when that copy was deleted or damaged.

See Also

• Disk space policy

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