The UW Physics provides a backup service using Bareos. We also utilize AFS backup volumes for quickly recovering “last night’s files” in our AFS file space. 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…
- Check your machine’s backup status here. Look for your machine’s DNS name.
- A backup attempt is made once daily. The specific time is unpredictable.
- If your computer was unavailable or becomes unavailable while a backup is in progress, then the server will try again the next day. No data is saved from the failed attempt.
- Full backups are made once every 6 months. This can take quite awhile. A typical rate is 35MB/sec. Point 2 continues to be relevant here: If a full backup cannot be completed, your computer is not backed up!
- Mobile devices such as laptops that are frequently disconnected from the network are problematic. Backing up documents via Google Backup and Sync may be a better option.
- Backups are retained for a half 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 resources. 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.