JFI UNIX offers a data backup service. This is available for all prevalent computer types -- for Linux, FreeBSD, Mac, and Windows; and for servers, clusters, and desktop workstations, to anyone who wants a backup solution.

(To begin backup service involving a terabyte or more of data, a financial contribution to the system may be required from your group to help pay costs of expanding the system.)

All of JFI's servers and most of our faculty-owned systems are currently protected by its chronological archive of past data, stored by days, weeks, months, and years, depending on the retention period being maintained for each particular system.

Both backup servers are using Rsnapshot, a Perl program which pulls in and retains the periodic backup snapshots efficiently, without taking any more space on the server than is necessary. Many of our backup archives (especially the backups for our home directory server) are setup to be retrievable by the users with no help from us, so that if a user needs to recover something, they may simply find their lost files and copy it out of the archive.

Some of our Linux desktops (including all three of the machines in the "fishbowl" lab -- joule, fresnel, and alder) offer NFS mounts of the JFI home directory backups. A user can simply copy their files from those shares whenever they need to.

Also, for the backups of individual Mac desktops that are being backed up, the personal backups can be accessed over AFP from the desktop of the user they belong to, by doing "connect to server" on the Mac desktop, and connecting to afp://penrose/. These backups are secure, and are not accessible to others besides their owner and the IT staff.

Recently, we began doing backups of Windows desktops. If you would like this service for your machine, it will require us to install an additional program on your computer to allow for connections from the backup server.

When looking at the backups, you will see a list of "daily", "weekly", and "monthly" snapshots. Each of these contains the complete state of the backed up content as it existed at the date of that folder. Look at each folder's date information to find the backup snapshot from the time period you are looking for.

Some types of backups, such as JFI email backups, can currently only be retrieved with IT staff assistance.