Backup Schedules

Backups are run on the departmental server systems each night - this covers for example your home directory, maths Zimbra email, the department website and any personal webspace on the people server etc. Those backups are generally further backed up to an off site location for disaster recovery.

The local scratch partition on Linux desktops is set to backup once per week on a Thursday night (or more often if the machine is in use and on overnight on other days) to the central university backup system which keeps a copy of the current file state. The compute systems backup to the same system but since on every night backup 7 nights per week. In all these cases though issues can arise and with 700+ systems backing up in this way not every failed backup will be investigated and more likely only persistent failures will be followed up.

As such the local scratch space is often good for computational data or archives of material that is not changing rapidly. Your home directory though is likely a better location for more important material that takes more human time to create/recreate provided it is not so large it is not suitable for that type of storage and backup system.

The central scratch is not backed up!