Backups¶
Danger
All ULHPC users should back up important files on a regular basis. Ultimately, it is your responsibility to protect yourself from data loss.
The backups are only accessible by HPC staff, for disaster recovery purposes only.
More precisions can be requested via a support request.
Directories on the ULHPC clusters infrastructure¶
For computation purposes, ULHPC users can use multiple storages: home, scratch and projects. Note however that the HPC Platform does not have the infrastructure to backup all of them, see details below.
| Directory | Path | Backup location | Frequency | Retention |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| home directories | $HOME |
not backed up | ||
| scratch | $SCRATCH |
not backed up | ||
| projects | $PROJECTWORK |
CDC, Belval | Weekly | one backup per week of the backup directory ONLY ($PROJECT/backup/) |
Directories on the SIU Isilon infrastructure¶
Projects stored on the Isilon filesystem are snapshotted weekly, the snapshots are kept for 10 days.
Danger
Snapshots are not a real backup. It does not protect you against a system failure, it will only permit to recover some files in case of accidental deletion
Each project directory, in /mnt/isilon/projects/ contains a hidden sub-directory .snapshot:
.snapshotis invisible tols,ls -a,findand similar commands- can be browsed normally after
cd .snapshot - files cannot be created, deleted or edited in snapshots
- files can only be copied out of a snapshot
Services¶
| Name | Backup location | Frequency | Retention |
|---|---|---|---|
| hpc.uni.lu (pad, privatebin) | CDC, Belval | Daily | last 7 daily backups, one per month for the last 6 months |
Restore¶
If you require a restoration of lost data that cannot be accomplished via the snapshots capability, please create a new request on Service Now portal, with pathnames and timestamps of the missing data.
Such restore requests may take a few days to complete.
Backup Tools¶
In practice, the ULHPC backup infrastructure is fully puppetized and make use of several tools facilitating the operations:
- backupninja, which allows you to coordinate system backup by dropping a few simple configuration files into
/etc/backup.d/ - a forked version of bontmia, which stands for "Backup Over Network To Multiple Incremental Archives"
- BorgBackup, a deduplicating backup program supporting compression and authenticated encryption.
- several internal scripts to pilot LVM snapshots/backup/restore operations