DECS offers data storage and backups to all College of Engineering users. These resources can be invaluable in case of hardware failures, recovering data or peace of mind that there is more than one copy of your data. Data is backed up daily, and quickly recoverable.
Network Drives
Over 100 terabytes of networked storage is available to hold data. Engineering users are familiar with the networked storage spaces provided through the use of home, office, research and web space. Using these spaces ensures that your data is backed up regularly, stored in a controlled environment, protected under disaster recovery plans and best of all, available to you from anywhere.
Backups for the network drives stored on the Netapp are completed in two ways: snapshots and tape. Easy restoration of data can be performed by using snapshots. A tape library is used for preserving data on a weekly and monthly basis with tapes stored at on-site and off-site locations.
A snapshot is a read-only copy of the entire file system and all the files on the networked storage spaces. Each one reflects the state of the file system at the time the snapshot was created. Snapshots can be immediately retrieved by users without the need to request a restoration of data from backup tapes. You can navigate through each snapshot as if it were active. Your directories and files will appear as they were at the time that the snapshot was taken. Snapshots are taken every hour on this schedule.
Full backups are completed monthly, and incremental backups are done weekly. All are written to tape and stored according to their retention schedules.
For information on how to use snapshots to restore a file, or to request a file be restored, see the How To: Recover a Lost File.
Storage
Below is a list of possible drives that are available to users for storage:
The courses space is available by request from a faculty or staff member each semester for instructional content. The intention is to provide space to deliver course materials and a space for students to work on shared projects together.
The "Instructors," "Assistants" and main "Shared" directories are preserved between semesters. The Sections directory and all sub-directories are cleared one week after the end of each semester. Any material in the Sections directory and sub-directories must be moved to a different network drive location in order to be preserved beyond one week after the end of each semester.
Scratch space is a networked storage location for temporary file storage. This space is intended to temporarily store data that is too large to fit in your home directory. The scratch space is never backed up, and files or directories more than seven days old are deleted. Do not store important files in this location.
This space is available on the all the DECS linux servers as /egr/scratch, and on the DECS Remote Desktop Services servers as the S: drive.
