CPS:Backups

Backing Up Your Data

We save all the files in the home directories of users on a daily basis. However, ultimately, you are responsible for backing up your data yourself - the daily service is intended to faciliate recovery after emergencies like a disk failure.

We have devices that allow storage on 4mm 50G DAT (on meta), 4mm 2G DAT (on duncan), 100MB ZIP disks (on risa and PC/Mac), and on 3.5" floppy disks (on PC/Macs/Meta/Linux's/Alphas). We recommend backing up using the 4mm DAT which is on duncan when the backups are less than 4-6G, as our tapes have a 2GB capacity and are much cheaper than the 50G tapes (75 dollars each).

2G tapes can be obtained from Jerry Morrow (or see Paul Trunfio or Luis Cruz-Cruz).

Again: You yourself are responsible for backing up your data not contained in your home directory.

Here are some technical hints for how to proceed, if you want to make one or multiple backups.

We recommend that you try the outlined procedure first on some less important data to gain confidence.

For very important data, we do not recommend that you try the multiple backups unless you are confident that you exactly understand what you are doing. Again, we cannot take the responsibility for the fate of your data.

Example (4mm tape)

login to duncan.
put the tape in duncan.
change directory to the directory that you want to back up by typing at the prompt (here just '>'):
```
> cd /directory/to/backup
```
If this is a NEW tape with nothing on it, type at the prompt (here just '>'):
```
	 tar -cv . 
```
which creates a backup of the current directory on tape.
If the tape already has something on it, to add backups to a tape, simply do the following:
```
	 tar -rv . 
```
This will add the backup to the end of the tape, after any existing backups.

UPDATED: 01-FEB-2000