How to restore files stored on the DIVMS network from Linux
Prerequisites:
- You must have a computer account in Mathematical Sciences (Computer Science, Mathematics, or Statistics).
- Restores are only available on NAS (network attached storage, including your home account, /group, etc), NOT on local OS file systems (/var/tmp, /tmp). If you can do a "df .|grep netapp" and get a string that says netapp, you're good to go, otherwise you're on non netapp based file systems and Snapshots are not available.
Introduction
Network attached storage on Linux clients are backed up with a unique NetApp technology called Snapshots. The Snapshot feature allows you to recover files and directories that were deleted, corrupted or altered on your network drives with out CSG intervention.
A Snapshot is a frozen, hidden, read-only view of files and folders at a specific point in time. CSG has scheduled a number of different Snapshots to help users with their restore needs as follows:
- A hourly Snapshot is taken each hour. Twenty four hourly Snapshots are available to view.
- A nightly Snapshot is taken each night at 12:00AM. Seven nights of nightly Snapshots are available to view.
- A weekly Snapshot is taken each Monday at 12:00AM. Two weeks of weekly Snapshots are available to view.
To access Snapshots of your files, cd into the hidden, read only ".snapshot" directory contained in each directory. If you've deleted a directory and are trying to restore the deleted directory, you'll need to cd up a level and access the higher level .snapshot directory.
Snapshots are named as follows in each .snapshot directory based upon the age the snapshot.
hourly.x or daily.y or weekly.z
Where:
Here's an example where a user is trying to restore their .cshrc startup file:
[jjurich@l-lnx100 ~]$ cd .snapshot
[jjurich@l-lnx100 .snapshot]$ ls
hourly.0 hourly.11 hourly.14 hourly.17 hourly.2 hourly.22 hourly.4 hourly.7 nightly.0 nightly.3 nightly.6
hourly.1 hourly.12 hourly.15 hourly.18 hourly.20 hourly.23 hourly.5 hourly.8 nightly.1 nightly.4 weekly.0
hourly.10 hourly.13 hourly.16 hourly.19 hourly.21 hourly.3 hourly.6 hourly.9 nightly.2 nightly.5 weekly.1
To restore your .cshrc file from 14 hours ago, one would do the following:
[jjurich@l-lnx100 .snapshot]$ cd hourly.14
[jjurich@l-lnx100 hourly.14]$ cp .cshrc ~jjurich/
If you still can't find the file or directory you're looking for, or are looking for files older than a week or two, send an email to request@divms.uiowa.edu. Weekly full backups are kept on tape for 12 weeks.
