Backup Information

That said, Support provides various backup strategies.

Retrospect

Retrospect is our primary backup mechanism. It allows us to recreate a snapshot of a file system at a point in time. It has a finite amount of space on the Retrospect server (currently around 800Gb) this lasts approximately one month, which is why not everything is automatically included.

Retrospect runs our critical servers as well as select individual machines. Retrospect takes a monthly snapshot and then incremental changes on a three month rotation. Users have no access to the Retrospect server, any file recoveries need to be requested. Please be aware, file recoveries may take a while depending on what needs to be recovered and from when.

Archives

Support takes archival copies of the systems twice a year at the end of each semester. These archives usually contain the home directories. Due to the increasing capacity of the systems, this process is being examined to discover if it is still feasible and/or practicable.

Incremental backups of undergraduate home areas are retained on removable hard disk media until the end of the current semester. This disk is then used for the following semsters undergraduate incremantal backup.

Incremental backups of staff and postgraduate home areas are retained on removable hard disk media permanently. Files such as iso images, software installers, music and movie files that can be recovered easily from download sites may be pruned to increase storage for critical user data.

Incremental

Users have access to backups of their own files under both Linux and Windows. This allows users to recover files modified recently without having to ask support to intervene. This is the preferred method of recovering files.

Linux Incremental

The Linux incremental are stored on the general purpose servers in the directory /backup/group/username/day

ie) If you are an undergraduate student, you would be able to find your incremental files on the machine "uggp.csse.uwa.edu.au" in /backup/ug03/student/ day refers to the day of the month the backup covers. So backups from the 7th of the month are in /backup/ug03/student/07

There is a file "index" in the /backup/group/username/ directory which provides a list of files and their paths which makes it easy to find missing files.

The incremental are not a full backup. Not everything is backed up and there are lots of configuration files and settings that are not touched. The system will not backup files more than 10Mb in size, nor will it go more than 14 levels. It will not cross file systems and it will only backup non-zero byte files. Therefore it will not backup a directory or follow symbolic links.

In addition there are filenames that it will not backed up. A list is contained below. This list may change, but it should give an indication of what is backed up or not backed up.

Files that end with:

~

Files that end in ~ are automatically created backups
        from vim

.$#!

Some weird file extension not critical I think.

.acrorc

Acrobat rc files ignore themA

album.dat

These are web gallary images changing daily and pretty
        meaningless

aquota.user

Quota database - can be rebuild

cert8.db

Mozilla certificates db

cookies.txt

Mozilla cookies file

core

core files

.dat.bak

Automatically generated gallery backup files

downloads.rdf

Mozilla download history

.DS_Store

Apple DS_Store files

%gconf.xml

gconf settings

history.dat

Mozilla history file

hostory.mab

Another Mozilla file

.ICEauthority

.ids

These are mail index files

key3.db

Mozilla keys

kickerrc

KDE Config file

localstore.rdf

Some mozilla file

metadata.db

Who cares about metadata?

.o

Exclude .o (object files)

pluginreg.dat

Mozilla plugin registry

photos.dat

The second part of the gallery things

popstate.day

Popstate files - who cares?

prefs.js

More mozilla preferences

,v

These are CVS versioning files

.viminfo

.viminfo - pretty useless

Files that include the following strings (case insensative):

.adobe

Adobe preferences

.aspell

Aspell stuff

appreg

Something to do with Mozilla

nobackup

Don't backup anything with this in the path

Cache

Cache files

.cmeta

Meta files from Evolution

core.

More core files

.DCOPserver

DCOP Stuff

.dvi

DVI files can be recreated

ev-summary

Part of Evolution

-expanded-mbox

More evolution cr@p

.kde

Bin the KDE settings

.gaim

gaim files

.gconf

Gnome settings

.gimp

Gimp settings

gnome.*panel

Gnome panel stuff

gnome2

More Gnome settings

ibex

Evolution index files

log.*trace

Should remove java log files

.metacity

These go too

msf

Thunderbird files

.nautilus

These go too

OpenOffice.org.*config

Open Office config files

OpenOffice.org.*regist

Open Office registry files

.pine-debug

Pine files

.qt

The qt files

.saves.*

Auto save files

.sawfish

Session info ignore it

studio5se_user

Sun One preferences

spam

Spam mailspools

.thumbnails

Thumbnail index files - why store them?

trash

Trash files

xsession-errors

Xsession errors

If you do not want a file backed up, it can be placed in a directory with the name "nobackup" in the path and it will not be included in the backup.

Windows Backups

Full Backup to Disk

All home directories are backed up weekly to at least 3 servers. In the event of a system failure a full backup, no more than 3 days old, of user home directories is immediately available.

Incremental Backup to Disk of Home Directories

The backup to disk service copies files that have been changed in the previous 48 hours to a large disk on the Windows servers Laksa, Tofu, Murtabak, Winserver03 and Winserver04. The backed files are accessible by users allowing users to restore their own files. The backup to disk system can hold between 30 to 60 days of incremental backup data.

Recovering files on the Incremental Backup System

The backups are located on the virtual server \\uwa-csse\csse-backup.. The daily backups are copied to a directory named after the current date. A backup on march 15 2006 will be copied to a directory named 15-3-2006. The backup directory has subdirectories for each of the user groups, i.e. staff, res, honours and undergrad_01 - 04. Each user has access to only their directory.

For example, if the third year student, smith01 modifies the file \\tofu\undergrad_04\smith01\project\myproject.c on 15-3-2006, it will be copied to \\tofu\backups\15-3-2006\undergrad_04\smith01\project\myproject.c.

Staff and Postgraduate Desktop Incremental Backups

Staff and postgraduate PCs are NOT BACKEDUP by default, but staff and postgraduates can request that their PCs be included in the backups system. These PCs can, when requested, will be backed up to a directory named after the PC name.

For example, on March 15 2006, PC-35 will be backed up to \\murtabak\backups\staff_res_pcs\pc-35\15-3-2006. The files will only be readable by the owner of the file on PC-35.

Importand data should not be stored on your PC hard drive. The hard drive on your PC should be considered "temporary storage" and that any information stored their may be lost. Important data should be stored in your home directory on the servers as these are mirrored and backedup with both daily incremental and weekly full backups.

Daily Incremental Backup to Disk Archive

The school provides a archive of daily backup to disk data. This archive is located at \\mutabak\archive. Daily incremental backups for the previous 3 to 5 months are stored in the archive.

Restrictions

- Files larger than 50 Mb are not backedup.
- The administrator user must have Read access to directories and files to be backed up.  This is not strictly true as the backup system runs in "backup mode" to copy data administrator does not have permission to access. In this case, users can recover their own data, but administrator is unable to access it.
- Backups are limited to 32 directory levels.