Engineering Backups

• Term - on the first day of the term (ie January 1, May 1, and September 1), all files that have changed are backed up, and a consistency check is performed to ensure the file on the backup server matches that of the home directory.
• Monthly - on the first day of the month, all files less than 2GB in size that have changed through-out the month are backed up.
• Weekly - early Sunday morning, all files less than 1GB in size that have changed through-out the week are backed up.
• Daily - occuring overnight, all files less than 127MB in size that have changed through-out the day are backed up.

Only a single backup process occurs throught-out the day.

The first timeframe to match in the above list is the process that will occur as it includes the processes below it.

• Daily backups are retained for one week
• Weekly backups are retained for one month
• Monthly backups are retained for one term
• Term backups are retained for one year

The latest backup snapshots are also backed up to the University's Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) service for off-site purposes.

Backups are stored in a redundant filesystem on a system with redundant drive array, redundant power supply, and redundant network connection. The consistancy of the backed up data is compared with the originals once per term.

Each department has restore capabilities for their respective hosts. As per recommended best practices unit administrators test the restore capabilities annually.