Backup and Disaster Dr Stuart Petch CeG IT/IS Manager

Introduction “In information technology, a backup or the process of backing up is making copies of data which may be used to restore the original after a data loss.” Data loss can occur through many different ways: Accidental deletion Corruption Theft Hardware failure Environmental (flood, fire, etc.)

What can happen

What can happen - 2 Well that was a little dramatic it is much more likely to be a few clicks, whirrs and the laptop refuses to boot up – a hard disk failure. This happens! What then? Well a RA in his third year here had this experience and hadn’t backed up since he started and kept everything on his laptop! We tried all our options – nothing. His supervisor had to find over a £1000 to have professionals recover data

What can happen - 3 Use a USB stick to keep all data on – no copies elsewhere. Loose USB stick Ph.D. Student in their 4 th year ready to submit. Thesis just about finalised on their stick and lost it!

What can you do? 1.Don’t use local hard drive (C:) 2.Use network drives supplied University networked drives (e.g. H:) are managed CeG network drives are managed 3.Ensure that you have copies elsewhere 4.Get into the habit of saving your work often

What is managed? A managed drive is one that is backed up and usually has “fault tolerance” i.e. the failure of 1 disk will not cause the data to be lost. Management: Data is regularly backed-up to tape or another machine. Backed up data is removed from the same site as the original. Shadow copies: copies of files are taken at predetermined intervals and stored either locally or on a distant machine (ISS 4 times a day) and can be accessed by the user to restore previous version of a file or a deleted version. Fault tolerance: can allow a disk, computer, etc. to fail and keep on running as if nothing is wrong.

What can you do? Use your H Drive provided by the University (if possible)

What can you do … You can access your H Drive from within most operating systems It is a fully managed resource Backup your data

What to backup to? 0-8GB USB Pen drive, Cloud??? 8Gb – 2TB Portable hard drive maybe a NAS, Cloud??? >2TB NAS or tape drive, Cloud???

5 Rules for backup 1.If you haven’t backed it up it cannot be recovered 2.If you don’t have a copy elsewhere then fire/flood etc. can destroy it 3.Any backup that has not been tested with a recovery is not a backup 4.Always check that your backups are working 5.Back it up or be prepared to loose it

What Software? Obviously depends on your operating system. Windows: Windows Backup SyncToy FreeFileSync Apple OS: TimeMachine Linux: tar rsync rsnapshot

Windows Windows Backup: Built in software that will backup the whole computer, so not ideal to backup a data set only. SyncToy: Free utility from Microsoft ( us/download/details.aspx?id=15155) us/download/details.aspx?id=15155 FreeFileSync: Open source free software (

Linux A small amount of reasonably static data: Tar is an easy to use utility for archiving data it’s available on all distributions of Unix/Linux Data that is added to on a daily basis but remains fairly static once created e.g. a data capture/control computer attached to an instrument: Use rsync : rsync stands for remote sync. The rsync utility is used to synchronize the files and directories from one location to another in an effective way. The backup location could be an attached external hard drive or or on a remote server. Avery large amount of data some static and some that is very volatile: In this situation you may want to consider using a utility called rsnapshot

Summary It won’t happen to me is no defence – it does and will. Keep as many copies of your critical data as possible in as many different places If you don’t know how to, ask! Use the University facilities provided Questions