Backups

Policy

There are at least three ways to make backups:

• a) We give you a 4TB portable drive, you keep it and write to it. Ask for one.
• b) Use CrashPlan/rsync and/or DropBox/Sync/Box.com to create backups in the cloud.
• c) We backup major cluster disks to tape, as follows:

Weekly backups, starting Friday night

• Cluster2: /nfs/home/

Quarterly backups, starting first day of quarter

• Cluster 2: /nfs/db
• Cluster 2: /nfs/store

Never backed up

• Cluster 2: /nfs/work
• Laptops
• Desktops
• No other user files are backed up, ever, unless by special request and agreed by email exchange.

Tape rotation and length of historical data

• We have four savepacks (sets of tapes, in a suitcase) 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.
• We also pull savepacks out of rotation from time to time to provide additional long-term backups.

Note

At time of writing, this policy is only implemented on Cluster 2. Select backups of Cluster 0 will follow soon.

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

Return to system administrator's guide.