Backups

Tape Backup

SNS account home, work and data directories are backed up to tape monthly and stored offsite for disaster recovery purposes. Tapes are retained for 1 year.

Snapshots

Snapshots are local copies of the filesystem. While not a true backup from a disaster recovery standpoint, they are very useful since you can recover your own deleted files. Each snapshot image acts as a full backup at that instant in time.

Snapshots are conducted hourly, daily and weekly for SNS accounts. On /home, /work as well as /data we retain one days worth of hourly snapshots (taken every hour on the hour), as well as one weeks worth of daily snapshots (taken at 11pm) on the local filesystem.

Snapshots are located in a hidden directory named .snapshot within each physical directory. Use the cp command to recover a file from snapshots. To recover a file called somefile from the 3pm hourly snapshot use e.g.

cp /home/user/somedir/.snapshot/hourly.15/somefile /home/user/somedir/

Note - More snapshots are available beyond those stored locally and retrievable by you. If you need a snapshot older than 1 week please see the computing staff as these snapshots are located on a separate fileserver. The retention period varies according to the filesystem and is as follows:

/home - 4 weeks of daily snapshots; 1 year of weekly snapshots
/work - 2 weeks of daily snapshots; 3 months of weekly snapshots
/data - 1 week of daily snapshots; 6 weeks of weekly snapshots

Mobile Backup

The IAS provides Crashplan, an online system that silently ensures your data is safe, by backing it up to servers at IAS. We urge you to use this simple and valuable service. We have licensed Crashplan for Faculty and for Members who have been given a computer by SNS Computing.

Installation is simple.

  1. Download the Crashplan Pro Client. Check the box for "I already have a Master License Key" to select the CrashPlan PRO Client for your operating system.
  2. Install CrashPlan PRO from the downloaded installer. In setup, use your IAS username and password and the crashplan server name: crashplan1.ias.edu
  3. In its original configuration, Crashplan backs up only one user account -- the one that installed the Crashplan client. If you add additional accounts, you must act to make sure they are also backed-up. Please refer to the "Change Selection" section of this Crashplan manual linked below. We recommend you put a check box in the entire "Users" directory so all current and future accounts will be backed-up.