⚠️ 2021-11-01: The TIPCC cluster is retired. If you're looking for a modern cluster, please see our new C4 cluster, which is in production since January 11, 2021.

Only user's home directories under /home/ are backed up - no other directories on the cluster file system are backed up!

File Backups (/home/ only)

All users’ /home/ directories are backed up regularly. Note that no other directories than /home/ are backed up. The below two types of backups are performed.

DIY-recovery backups

Weekly backups to another disk (starts Fridays @ 11:00 PM and completes in ~5 hours)
Backup history: Only last backup
Recovery: Do it yourself by copying from /backup/home/$USER/
- Modified files: Previous version of a modified file can be recovered from the backup until next backup runs
- Deleted files: A deleted file can be recovered from the backup until next backup runs
Technical details: rsync -avzHAX --delete /home/$USER/ is used to backup. See cat /backup/home/home_backup.log for the log.

Archival backups

Nightly backups to tape (full every weekend and incremental nightly)
Backup history: ~8 months
Recovery: Contact your sysadm
- Modified files: Previous versions of a modified file can be recovered from the archive for up to 8 months
- Deleted files: A deleted file can be recovered from the archive for up to 8 months
- Backups were re-instantiated on 2020-05-01 we cannot restore files from before then.
- Remember - this is a tape backup system. Restores are manual and require attention.
- Restores will be done within 5 business days of the restore request.
- Please submit restore requests using the Issue Tracker