You will be part of a group at the department. All group disks have similar names and stucture. E.g., if you are part of the tpg group, you will have access to
On the PC, \\geofag\felles can be used as an access point to all relevant department disks - so, for instance, \\geofag\felles\tpggruppe-prosj will take you the right place. The unix name for this access point is /felles.
In addition to normal backup, user disks on the Terra machine are mirrored locally every night. Last night's mirror can be found at jern:/mn/jern/backup/diskname/username\ (UNIX) or \\jern\backup\diskname\username (PC); feel free to copy back things yourself. This mirroring is now not done for the Geologi/Geofag machine any more.
Authorative info is at USIT's backup page; this is some basic info in English: User disks are backed up nightly, other disks weekly. The backup is done incrementally; so your whole file area isn't backed up every night, just the changes from last night. 7 versions are (usually) kept, for (usually) 3,5 years. This means if you change a given file every day you will be able to go back a week, but if you change it every month you will be able to go back over half a year.
Your home area resides on a 10GB disk that is shared with other users. For technical reasons (restore and mirroring) we do not want home areas to grow too large. Upon request we will make a symbolic link to another disk from your home area. This link is called "datadisk"; from windows it will look like a normal folder. The link points to a disk on which you can store a large amount of data. That disk is usually backed up weekly (not daily - but please contact us about this if you want changes), apart from that you can regard it simply as an extension of your home area.
The link points to /felles/your_group-prosj/your_username. You can easily make a file area and link like that yourself; if you don't want to we can do it for you.
Staff can have data storage disks at your_groupstaff/your_username. These disks will be backed up daily - however, we reqire groups to keep storage space backed up daily somewhat low so we'd like to talt to the group leader about this arrangement before we start.
Never have important data on local disks. Disks regularly lose all their data with no chance of recovery, and we have no backup.
For document sharing, we recommend using your web page. Our quick guide to web publishing might help.
For storing "personal" project data: Use your group's project data disk, e.g. /mn/geofag/tpggruppe-prosj/ (unix) or \\geofag\felles\tpggruppe-prosj (PC). If your group doesn't
have one, ask for it. Catalogues here are typically named with the user name of the person working on the project. This can be seen as an extension of a user's home area for users with
large data storage needs. Usually, home area extensions are linked directly from the home area. Example:
~arnsteio/datadisk -> /mn/geofag/itgruppe-prosj/arnsteio
(Home areas cannot grow too big. This is our workaround.)
Group data and databases: Data sets and databases should be put in the data disk, e.g. /mn/geofag/tpggruppe-data/. Catalogues should typically be named after the kind of data in them, e.g "gmt" for map data for the gmt program.
We recommend that projects in which several people will work on the same files, where data typically will be more fluid, have their data in a catalogue (with the project's name) on the group's project disk. We can help out with setting up groups for access rights.
We usually install group-specific unix programs in the group program disk, e.g. /mn/geofag/gfgruppe-prog. Usually these programs are still accessible by all users, on all machines.
With regards to privacy matters, a catalogue on the group's project data disk is concidered less "your private sphere" than your home area. We will never trespass on your home area, but we might have a look at a catalogue on a group data disk if we think we need to fix something.
Department Unix programs are installed under /site on all machines. terra:/mn/terra/system is the master /site disk; most other machines sync this area over to their own /site, while some machines mount this area instead.
We are flexible and frequently implement exemptions to the above. However, having some basic data structure is important.
A deleted file is often easy to reconstruct if you have the physical disk the file was stored on.
Disks that have been in servers don't leave the building until we've completely destroyed the info on them, or are confident any 3rd party which might get hold of the disks have adequate procedures regarding information handling and/or deletion. This means any info stored on M: or other data disks is safe throughout the life cycle of the information, from initial storage until after deletion.
Client disks (that means e.g. the disk in your PC) are assumed not to contain sensitive information so are scrapped without thoughts for physical information security. Though the chance of problems stemming from this is probably slim it means you should make sure that any data you wouldn't want to leak out should only be stored on our server-side data disks.