UW-Physics Backups

The UW Physics provides a backup service using the TiBS software from Teradactyl. We also utilize AFS backup volumes for quickly recovering "last night's files" in our AFS file space.

Do not assume your computer has been backed up! You are responsible for making sure your backups have been completed successfully. You can check the status of backups by host name here and view the status and reports online.

If you need AFS files restored, please let us know ASAP. Recovering files from AFS backup volumes is very easily done; whereas recovering older AFS files is time consuming.

We offer our backup service to faculty and staff. To request backups, please contact help@physics.wisc.edu.

Here are some important points about our backup service you should know...

• Full backups are taken during the first weekend of each month (starting on Friday at midnight and ending sometime Saturday or Sunday.)
• Incremental backups (for servers and desktop computers) are taken every night starting at midnight. They typically end before 5:00am.
• Incremental backups for laptops are taken at noon each workday.
• Backups are retained for one year.
• In general we do not backup filesystems (disks) mounted under /Volumes (e.g. on computers running MacOS-X.) Please contact us if you need a disk mounted under /Volumes backed up.
• Our backup service has limited resouces. Should your backup sets grow too large, we will need to adjust how your system is backed up.
• We can provide daily email reports about your backups. Click here for examples.
• Thorough information about our TiBS backups can be found here, and the current status of the backup service can be found here.
• Our backup service has limited resouces. Should your backup sets grow too large, we will need to adjust how your system is backed up.

If you'd like help with backups, or have any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to contact help@physics.wisc.edu. (Note that you must send mail from a .edu, cern.ch, or desy.de mail account.)