Backups

We do not currently back up to our own tape drives. However we do use the IT-Services Central Backups service to back up /home and /usr/local from our main server (sgra.star.bris.ac.uk) every day.
For those of you with project students, the home directories on the calgary server are backed up, the /data/cluster* disks are not backed up.

Disk Backups

The /home disk is completely copied every weekend to /data/cepheus1/HomeDirectoriesBackup/. Only the last 3 backups are kept. You should be able to recover files up to 14 days old from these backups. This is the easiest way to recover a file as it exact mirror of your filespace on the date the backup was done. You can copy the file back to your home disk space yourself without help from the system manager.

The /home disk is incrementally backed up every night to /data/scratch4/homeincbackups
The 28 most recent incremental backups are kept. You must ask the system manager (Rhys) to recover files for you from this backup.

Incremental backups are kept in gzipped tar file accessible only to root. A list of the files backed up is also kept in the backup directory.

In addition, the /home disk is backed up nightly to the Computer Centre across the road using Networker' - Enterprise level backup software from Sun Microsystems also called EBS (this is a re-badged EMC/Legato product). Tapes are kept for 3 months for this backup. Please contact the system manager if you need to recover files up to 3 months old.

In general, the /data/ disks are NOT BACKED UP. There are a few exceptions

Some of /data/perseus[1-3] is backed up to the RDSF.
/data/lacerta? disks are mirrored to /data/grus1 and to RDSF

Let me repeat, all other /data/ disks are not backed up. Keep important files in your home directory and keep data on the data disks. If your data is hard to download, or has been processed, keep a copy on another /data/ disk. We have a page on how to do this using the rsync program.

As a general rule, try to keep the contents of your home directory under around 500gb as any more is hard to backup and scan for viruses/malware.


Rhys Morris
Last modified: Wednesday, 02 December 2020