Introduction

Click here to see the CoC Backup Architecture.

Backups are primarily performed on the College’s core servers and on requested research systems. The backup system as currently implemented is meant to protect the College in two ways - disaster recovery and accidental removal/corruption. Full backups are done quarterly and retained as archives. Daily backups are done throughout the semester, usually during the late evening and early morning hours. A dated set of tapes is periodically rotated off-site to a bonded tape storage facility for disaster recovery purposes.

Daily backups occasionally fail due to network or host problems and are not normally retried until the following day. This means that if a file has been around for a few days, it will likely be on a backup, but there is always a possibility that files created in the last 24 to 48 hours have not yet made it onto a backup. Barring such hardware problems, we should be able to reload a file to its state sometime within the last 24 hours, as well as at various past intervals of time (weeks, months, and semesters into the past, as long as the tapes are still readable). The occasional exception would occur when it takes more than 24 hours for us to complete a monthly full backup; during this time, we are not always able to also make daily backups.

Research Server Backups

Requested research systems are backed up using the Sun product Solstice Suite Backup. As a rule, only research file servers in TSO data centers are routinely backed up. If you feel there is a particular file system that is not being backed up that needs to be, please let us know so that we can add the necessary partitions to the backups.

We retain full quarterly backups for 6 months only.    Daily incremental backups are performed which also are retained for 6 months.

We do not back up the operating system or standard configuration files on most research systems (for example, on UNIX systems, the /, /usr, and /var partitions, except for /var/spool/mail), since these are easy to recreate. Similarly, no public cluster or desktop workstation is backed up at all.

Core Server Backups

Core servers are being backed up using the CommVault Simpana Software Suite. Quarterly full backups are made in February, May, August, and November. In addition, full backups are also made during the other months to improve restore times. Incremental backups are performed daily.

Incremental backups during a semester are kept for 30 days. Monthly full backups are kept for approximately 2 months.

How to Request a File Restore

To request a restore, send email to help@cc (see Obtaining Help from TSO Staff Members). Please include the complete path name(s) of the affected file(s), such as machinename:/usr/local/program/file. If you can possibly supply it, the approximate range of time in which the file was in a known good state can also be very helpful to us. Given that it can take several hours to read a backup tape, please understand that it can take most of a day to restore a directory if we have to go through multiple tapes. Size, number of files, and frequency of change also affect the restore time. Because of this and other commitments we have, we cannot promise instant response to your reload request. If you will please let us know the true urgency when you ask for a reload, we will do our best to accommodate you.