All BCoE faculty, staff and students should store files directly on the college file server known as “toaster”, which is normally mapped as your “Z drive”. "Toaster's" operating system takes a snapshot of files on a regular basis (details below). All files on "toaster" are copied to a backup server once a week and to tape once a week on a fifteen-week cycle, this does not include snapshots. For long term retention, a backup archive is normally taken one time a year and overwritten.
Files that are excluded from backups are:
It should also be noted that:
Computers on the ENGR domain use a windows profile to store a user’s settings which includes favorites, desktop and my documents. Windows attempts to copy these files from the server during login and back to the server during log off. This process is not guaranteed and a windows profile is considered a temporary environment and should not be relied on for backup. Any files that need to be backed up should be stored on toaster directly and not in a user’s profile. It should also be noted that no other files on the local C drive are backed up.
Computers not on the ENGR domain, such as laptops or other special systems are not backed up at all by the system group. Users of these computers will need to contact the systems group to make special arrangements if they need files stored on these computers backed up.
Unless special arrangements have been made, desktops, notebooks, PCs, and research servers are not backed up by systems. Mapped/mounted volumes of toaster are backed up as described above.
As described above, all data on "toaster" is copied once a week to a secondary server at UCR and another offsite server. In the event of a disaster, the most recent data available will be restored. Depending on the timing of the disaster the most recent data maybe only hours old or could be as old as two weeks. Secondary and offsite servers do not contain snapshots or any file history (ie previous versions).
"Toaster's" operating system tracks the differences in files on preset intervals, this process is known as a snapshot. Snapshots provide the ability to recover previous version of files.. To access previous snapshots (from Toaster or Locker (Z and L drives)), type ~snapshot after a Windows directory or .snapshot in any Unix directory. Our snapshot cycle is as follows:
Note Windows OS will only display snapshots at the top level for example:
Z:\~snapshot works
Z:\somedir\~snapshot will not work
UNIX systems will display at all levels using .snapshot
cd ~/.snapshot works
cd ~/subfolder/.snapshot works