Data Recovery

  The departmental Filestore is backed up according to a daily, weekly and monthly schedule. 

Note the term  filestore refers to the home directories of all users registered to use 
the Computer Science network and the areas used by Web services to hold uploaded projects and coursework.

Requests to recover lost data from these backups must be sent to the CS help-desk. 
Ie via an email to Csc-helpdesk@liverpool.ac.uk.

 * Backup methods


Backups are made of each users Linux home directory (also accessible under Windows as theH: drive.
Daily backups are made on line to file and replicated off site. Usually at least the previous month of
 daily backups are retained.

 
Monthly and incremental weekly backups are made to magnetic tape for secure off line storage.
LTO-8 tape drives used; a native capacity of 12TB per tape,

 * Recovery procedure


The sooner a recovery request is made, following  a loss of data, the easier it will
 be to recover the data. The following information iis required for the recovery process:

1) The path to the file or directory tree to be recovered relative to your home directory.
   Eg for a lost HTML index owned by user 'fred' and therefore located under /home/fred this might be
   ./public_html/index.html 

2) The exact date and, if possible, the time at which the file was last modified. - that 
   includes when it was written, (and possibly corrupted). 

3) Date/time of deletion if known.

If an on line file backup can be found data recovery will be a quick process.
Recovery from tape may take much longer; depending on the location of the file on tape
and the size of the tape image.

 * Archives


Those leaving the Department should, after deleting personal material from their account, leave their 
research work under an appropriately named  directory: Old Staff/PhD user accounts are permanently stored 
off line, in the CS archives.

25/10/23