Resources

Data Backup on Department Systems

The University of Arizona Computer Science Department provides a number of computing systems for CS faculty, staff, and students. Major operating systems supported include Linux and Windows. Because of the variety of OS's and number of computing platforms that exist in the department, there are different backup schemes currently in use. Users should familiarize themselves with these backup schemes and schedules (as they apply to their situation) in order to protect important data they create on Department systems. Users should not assume that all data on all systems is backed up. The person ultimately responsible for your data is you. If your data is too important to lose, then you should discuss the situation with Lab staff personnel. When in doubt, e-mail lab.

No backups of any kind are kept for longer than one year.

Student Instructional Systems

Students taking classes in the CSc Department receive an account on the general instructional timesharing system, Lectura, and an account in the CSC Windows domain. These accounts allow access to all the PC's in our instructional labs. Users have their files, aka home directory, served by our centralized file server, Salado.

Salado is mirrored**** daily to remote disk and the mirror written to tape each month, however, the primary file recovery mechanism of which users should be aware is a feature called snapshot. This feature allows users to restore their own lost files. Student files may alternatively be restored from tape, but this procedure is both lengthy and time consuming and will only be considered in extraordinary cases.

Students using the instructional PC's under Windows or Linux should access and store their user files on the centralized file server, Salado. Under Linux, your home directory will appear identical to that of Lectura and be mounted automatically when you log in. Windows users will see their home directory as a series of files on the H: drive*.

The most common mistake students using lab PC's make is to accidentally store files outside their home directory, i.e., Salado. For example, Windows users often drag files onto their desktops, rather than to the H: drive. Files existing on the lab PC's are not backed up, nor are they protected from access by other users.

No backups of any kind are kept for longer than one year.

Faculty Assigned Office Systems

Faculty in the CSc Department receive accounts on the instructional timesharing server, Lectura, and the majority of Linux systems within the department including the PC's in their office. Faculty have their files, aka home directory, served by our centralized file server, Sinagua.

Sinagua is mirrored**** daily to remote disk and the mirror written to tape each month, however, the primary file recovery mechanism of which users should be aware is a feature called snapshot. This feature allows users to restore their own lost files. Files may alternatively be restored from tape, but this procedure is both lengthy and time consuming and should only be requested if absolutely necessary.

Faculty using their PC's under Windows or Linux should access and store files on the centralized file server, Sinagua. Under Linux, your home directory will appear identical to that of Lectura and be mounted automatically when you log in. Windows users will see their home directory as a series of files on the H: drive.

Windows files stored directly on the PC are backed up nightly upon the request of the user. Upon request of the user means, that the user's PC remains booted in Windows overnight at least one day per week, or that special arrangements are made to do a backup during working hours***. Backups, particularly from a laptop, may take several hours to complete.

Files stored directly on a Faculty Linux PC can be scheduled to be backed up nightly. For such a backup to occur, the system needs to be identified as being primarily a Linux machine. If the system is running Linux at the scheduled time, then most files will be copied to backup tape. A user may elect to not have files backed up by placing them in directories below one named do.not.backup, additional exclusions exist for files such as .mp3 or .mp2 and the vmware image file. Other Linux machines that are scheduled to have at least partial backups include service machines such as WWW and the student DHCP systems. E-mail lab to arrange Linux backups of your PC.

No backups of any kind are kept for longer than one year.

RA/TA Assigned Office Systems

RA's and TA's in the CSc Department receive an account on the general instructional timesharing system, Lectura, and an account in the CSC Windows domain. Users of Lectura have their files, aka home directory, served by our centralized file server, Salado.

Salado is mirrored**** daily to remote disk and the mirror written to tape each month, however, the primary file recovery mechanism of which users should be aware is a feature called snapshot. This feature allows users to restore their own lost files. Files may alternatively be restored from tape, but this procedure is both lengthy and time consuming and should only be requested if absolutely necessary.

RA's and TA's using their PC's under Windows or Linux should access and store files on the centralized file server, Salado. Under Linux, your home directory will appear identical to that of Lectura and be mounted automatically when you log in. Windows users will see their home directory as a series of files on the H: drive.

Windows files stored directly on the PC are not backed up.

Linux files saved in /scratch are not backed up.

RAs and TAs frequently change office locations. Office changes will most always entail a change to new desks with new or different computers, while old computers are assigned to someone else or surplused.

Data left on the /scratch partition of any desktop machine will not necessarily be available after the move. The same goes for data on the local partitions under Windows. Even on machines that are being reassigned, data on the local drive is subject to deletion during the clean up of the machine in preparation for assigning it to a new user. The scratch partition is just that, scratch, and is not to be used for long term storage of important data.

It is not acceptable to store your data on the /scratch partition of someone else's machine, even if that machine used to be yours. If the user currently assigned to this machine needs the space, the lab staff would delete your files to make space available for the current owner of the machine.

Data is absolutely the most precious commodity we possess. If you lose your data, not only are you hurt, but also your research, and therefore your research advisor, may be impacted. The person ultimately responsible for your data is you. When in doubt, e-mail lab.

No backups of any kind are kept for longer than one year.

Staff Assigned Office Systems

Staff in the CSc Department receive an account on the general timesharing system, Lectura, most of the Linux computers in the department, including York, and an account in the CSC Windows domain. Users have their files, aka home directory, served by our centralized file server, Sinagua.

It is recommended that staff using PC's under Windows or Linux access and store files on the centralized file server, Sinagua. Under Linux, your home directory will appear identical to that of baskerville/lectura and be mounted automatically when you log in. Windows users will see their home directory as a series of files on the H: drive.

It is realized that most staff do not use Sinagua as their primary storage location for Windows files, therefore, all staff PC's are backed up nightly***. Staff users should understand where their Windows applications store their critical data files in order to expedite file restore requests***. Please feel free to contact lab for assistance in this matter.

No backups of any kind are kept for longer than one year.

Users of Miscellaneous Research Systems within the Department

Users of various research systems within the Department, e.g., CL, or CY clusters, Vochelle (MP Linux), Wonka (SGI), etc., should note that these systems are not backed up. Users are expected to store important files in their home directories (which are backed up) and move these to the appropriate research systems for use.

Windows machines in the CS labs are not backed up. Data that is saved to the C: or D: partition of lab machines can, and probably will, be deleted from time to time by administrators.

*If you login to a lab PC and your H: drive is not mounted, try restarting the machine and log in again. If this does not work, then try another PC in the lab. Report any failures to mount the H: drive to lab*. Note also that file naming rules for Windows are different from Unix naming rules. Windows file names with special characters, upper case letters and the like may produce strange results when the ls command is run under Unix.

**Nightly backups for individual Windows machines means Monday through Friday. Weekends are reserved for backing up centralized servers. Zero level Windows backups are created at the start of even months (Feb, Apr, Jun, etc.) and are interspersed with weekday incrementals until the beginning of the next even month.

***Requests for file restores require that the user provide the file name, file location, and last time that the file was know to exist.

****Mirror means that when a file is deleted on the source machine it will soon (after a few days) be removed from the mirror system. This means that the mirror is not a good recovery method for certain deletion instructions.

Last updated Monday, 07-Jan-2008 09:32:28 MST, by John Luiten
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