Backup and Restore

Home and RDS areas

Backups

Isilon filesystems – home directories and any additional Research Data Storage areas you may have access to – are backed up as follows:

• Snapshots (backups) are taken every hour, at half-past the hour, and kept for 24 hours
• After 24-hours, a daily backup, taken at half-past midnight, is kept for 35 days.

Recovery

You can recover home and Research Data Storage files yourself.

For example, if you delete a file or folder, or make an unwanted change to a file, or overwrite it accidentally.

Every directory on isilon (e.g., in your home directory) has a hidden directory called .snapshot – move in to that directory and you will see directories for various dates and times (see below). Choose the one closest to before you deleted the file, and then you should be able to find a copy of the file you have deleted. You can then copy that file back to your home directory.

For example, to access the .snapshot (backup) area in your home directory (or any other sub-folder in your home or RDS storage):

cd .snapshot

Have a look at the list of backups:

ls -1
Reynolds_NONFAC_NFS_24hr_2019-02-11_15-30-00          # These are the hourly backups.
Reynolds_NONFAC_NFS_24hr_2019-02-11_16-30-00          # Each backup is made at 30 minutes past
...                                                   # the hour. There are 24-hours worth.
Reynolds_NONFAC_NFS_24hr_2019-02-12_14-30-00


Reynolds_NONFAC_NFS_28days_2019-01-09_00-30-00        # These are the daily backups.
Reynolds_NONFAC_NFS_28days_2019-01-10_00-30-00        # Each backup is made at 30 minutes past
...                                                   # midnight. There are 35-days worth
Reynolds_NONFAC_NFS_28days_2019-02-12_00-30-00        # (despite the 28days in the name!)

Choose a backup directory that is just before the date and time where you deleted (or damaged) the file or folder you wish to restore. For example:

Suppose we wish to restore a folder named mywork we accidentally deleted earlier today at about 11am. We will use the 24-hour backup taken at 10:30am to restore from:

# Go in to the backup folder (today's 10.30am backup in our example)
cd Reynolds_NONFAC_NFS_24hr_2019-02-12_10-30-00

# Check that the files/folders you wish to restore are in this backup folder
# (if not, go to an earlier backup folder in the list of folders)
ls mywork

# Copy the entire "mywork" folder back to the directory where it was originally
# (the ../.. means go up two levels. Remember, we are now in .snapshot/Reynolds_NONFAC_NFS..some_data)
rsync -av mywork ../..

# Suppose you want to recover just some files - e.g., all the .dat files - back to where they were:
rsync -av *.dat ../..

A big advantage of isilon is that if you only created the files an hour or two before you deleted it there is a high chance of getting it back.

If the deletion occurred longer than 35 days ago, but you perhaps did not notice it had happened, then it will not be possible to recover the file.

Scratch

It is NOT possible to recover files from the scratch filesystem. If you delete them (or trash them), or the scratch clean-up system policy deletes them, they are gone forever.