Backups

From CCRMA Wiki

Your home directory is backed up automatically each day to a backup server. You can access these daily images by going to:

/usr/ccrma/backup/<username>

There, you will see directories with names like '20070804,' which corresponds to the date of the backup.

Inside this directory you'll see another directory named 'tree.'

/usr/ccrma/backup/<username>/<date-directory>/tree

'tree' corresponds to your home directory. So, inside it you'll see all the files and dictories backed up on that date. This is an 'image' or snapshot of what your home directory looked like at backup time. Backups are taken sometime between midnight and 8am generally.

You can read from (copy from) these directories, but cannot write to them.

So, if you deleted a critical soundfile from your home directory (e.g. ~/sounds/best-sound-ever.ogg) you could copy that file back into your home directory by visiting the most recent date directory where the soundfile exists and copy it back, somewhere into your home directory, like this:

~> cp /usr/ccrma/backup/<username>/<date-directory>/tree/sounds/best-sound-ever.ogg ~/sounds

The backup images are retained inside a 3 month window according to the following schedule:

That is, for two weeks back from the present day, you have an image available for each day. Further back than two weeks, but less than five, you have MWF images available (T,Th,Sa, and Su images have been deleted). From five to twelve weeks, you have only each Friday's image available (M and W are deleted), and after twelve weeks, all images are deleted.

Backup Exceptions

There is a system in place which will allow you to prevent certain files from being backed up. You would want to do this if you have large sets of source material, generally sound or video files, which you have already backed up to DVD, but need on the network drive for some reason (e.g. to be accessed for computation or analyis of some sort). This would be data that is on the order of Gigabytes. You can exclude this data from backups by:

1) Creating a directory called '.ccrma' in your home directory.

~> cd
~> mkdir .ccrma

2) Then in that directory, create a file called: 'dirvish.conf' Dirvish is the name of the backup program.

~> cd .ccrma
~> gedit dirvish.conf

3) In that file place the directory names that you want to exclude from backups in the following syntax:

exclude:
     /sounds/big-project
     /temp

Where the the leading slash represents your home directory root.

4) Save the file

Dirvish will check this file first before starting the backup, and will not backup these directories listed in it.

If you somehow forget to exclude something big, please contact the SysAdmin Team and let us know so we can delete it from the backup server.

Quotas

CCRMA does not enforce quotas per se. We expect the community to respect reasonable usage of disk space, and to manage their data responsibly. That said, we do get daily usage reports including a 'Hog Report.' If we feel your storage approach needs some attention, you'll hear from us. If you have a big project coming up, please come and see us about how we might best configure the system.