Backups

Snapshots on /home and /data

Snapshots are local copies of the filesystem which are conducted hourly. 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.

On /home we retain one days worth of hourly snapshots , as well as two weeks worth of daily snapshots and 26 weeks worth of weekly snapshots.

NOTE On 8/6/21 we updated the retention period on /home to retain one days worth of hourly snapshots , as well as 4 weeks worth of daily snapshots and 52 weeks worth of weekly snapshots.

On /data we retain one days worth of hourly snapshots, as well as one weeks worth of daily snapshots and 12 weeks worth of weekly snapshots.

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/

Offsite Backup

In addition to snapshots, /home and /data directories are backed up to an offsite location for disaster recovery purposes. The data is fully encrypted during transit as well as at rest at both source (IAS) and destination.

CrashPlan

We use CrashPlan for remote backups on IAS-owned laptops and in some cases to backup data from local disk on our desktops. If you wish to use CrashPlan on a personal laptop, please contact SNS Computing staff and we will help you get set up.