• What happens if you delete accidentally some (all) files of your directory ?
• What happens if you want to recover a file that you deleted/changed 2 weeks ago or more ?
• What happens if your workstation stop working ?
• What happens if the File Server stop working ?
• What happens if a disk stop working ?
• What you have to do in order to backup your data?

In order to answer to these questions, we prepared some systems (hardware and software) that save/backup/move our data in an automatic fashion. This way the human intervention (and so the possibility of error) is reduced at the minimum.

Remember that when we say home directory, we talk about your homedirs stored on the file server, we don't do backup of workstations.
For some suggestion on how to backup your laptop see here.
If a workstation stop working is not a problem, we can repair/substitute the workstation without loss of important data.

The most important thing that humans and computer share is just one: the data recorded. No matter what kind of computer, interface, type of connection or whatever else mechanical/logical device users can/must use: if they can't access their data (stored inside the computer), problems arise. For a user it is not important where or how the data are saved, the only important thing is that he/she needs access to these data, even in case of his/hers fault.

To offer the maximum support to users, our Network has different method to backup the data. Each method has pros and cons, and not all the method are accessible directly to the users. In some cases the user must ask to the System Administrators to recover his/hers data from the backup devices. This is necessary to maintain a good level of compromise between access to data and security. The backups are complete collections of all the data that all users collect and thus we have to consider the access to these repositories carefully.
We have 2 different level of backup that offer access to deleted/changed files with different solutions.

• Backup in the .snapshot directory
• Backup on Hard Disk in a central backup sever

we maintain a read-only copy of all data directly in the file server, for up to 3 months. Users can request to access his/hers data back in time, providing the time range they want to recover from. the possibilities are:

• hourly: last 24 hours
• daily: last 3 months or 90 days

On a secondary server, accessible only to Network System admins, we store a copy of all the data/files present in the primary server. We can then recover pretty fast the data, even in case of failure of the primary server. Stored in this server we maintain the last 180 days of all the homedirs, so in case of failure of the central file server we can restart with only 1 day of lost.

To retrieve a file from this server the user must ask it to System Administrators, and please don't forget the details about the file.

Each Laptop managed by the lab must be configured to backup all the work files using the Backup solution provided by EPFL (aTempo Lina, at the moment). The backup solution for laptop is under the direct control of the user, please follow strictly the directives so to no lose your data/files.

Please refer to this page for more information about backup of laptops