Recovering files from backups

CSG operate an online backup system, which allows you to directly access backup copies of home directories and group volume areas. The online backup system contains nightly snapshots of these areas going back several days, meaning that -- in most common cases -- lost or mangled files can be easily recovered without the need for assistance from CSG.

This document explains how to retrieve historical files from the online backup system.

Recovering files under Linux

cd /vol/recover/homes/<username>

Please note: as of Summer 2013, user home directories have been moved to a different file-server. Please use the following location instead:

cd /vol/recover2/homes/<username>

The full copy of your home directory as of the previous night is in the sub-directory full. Each of the inc-n sub-directories contain files that changed about n nights ago.

That is:

Group project directories are also backed up and can be found in:

/vol/recover/vol/project

Remember if you copy any files from the backups to your current home directory you need to rename them to avoid overwriting existing files!

In the specific case of your .email file - your email Inbox for users whose email has not yet been migrated to College Email - you need to be especially careful so as not to lose recent email. We recommend that you copy (say) last night's version back as follows:

cp /vol/recover/homes/USERNAME/full/.email ~/IMAP/RecoveredInbox

(cp /vol/recover2/homes/USERNAME/full/.email ~/IMAP/RecoveredInbox)

Now you can use your favourite email client (perhaps after refreshing it's idea of what IMAP folders exist), to select the RecoveredInbox folder, view the messages, and decide which messages to move back into your main Inbox. We recommend that you end up deleting the RecoveredInbox folder - it's only a transitional folder, don't keep it hanging around for ever!

Recovering files under Windows

Start - Run... - \\fs-vol-recover2.doc.ic.ac.uk\recover2\

or

Start - Run... - \\fs-vol-recover.doc.ic.ac.uk\recover

The folder recover2 will contain backups for your home directory. The folder recover will contain backups of the /vol areas such as the group project areas. The layout of the directories is the same as described above.

Recovery of older files

If the files that you need to restore were lost more than 12 nights ago, they will not be available from the online backup system. If this is the case, you can contact CSG to request a file restore from the offline tape backup system.

Please note that as this is a time-consuming process requiring retrieval of the appropriate tapes from secure storage and manual processing, you should allow at least a working day for file recovery requests to be serviced. Please help us by being as precise as you can about the Unix path of the data and roughly when it was deleted or corrupted.