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.
ULHPC has 3 different backup targets, with different rotation policies and physical locations.
The backups are only accessible by HPC staff, for disaster recovery purposes.
More precisions can be requested via a support request.
User directories on the ULHPC clusters¶
| Directory | Path | Backup location | Frequency | Retention |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| home directories | $HOME |
CDC, Belval | Weekly | last 7 backups, at least one per month for the last 2 months |
| projects | $PROJECTWORK |
CDC, Belval | Weekly | one backup per week of the backup directory ($PROJECT/backup/) |
| scratch | $SCRATCH |
not backed up |
Isilon project directories snapshots¶
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
Virtual machines¶
| Source | Backup location | Frequency | Retention |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gitlab infrastructure | CDC, Belval | Weekly | last 5 weekly snapshots |
| Iris infrastructure | CDC, Belval | Weekly | last 5 weekly snapshots |
Services¶
| Name | Backup location | Frequency | Retention |
|---|---|---|---|
| gitlab.uni.lu | CDC, Belval | Daily | last 7 daily backups, one per month for the last 6 months |
| 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.
Purging¶
Note
See Filesystem Quotas and Purging for detailed information about inode, space quotas, and file system purge policies.
Warning
$SCRATCH directories are not backed up
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