The IBM system is equipped with a secondary storage device (tape robot) with more than 70 Terabyte tapes. The tape robot is used for the storage of backup data and archiving (large) files. The tape robot is generally available for users of the IBM p690 Regatta (tre) and the IBM clusters (fire and fimm).

Backup policy

Incremental backups (only modified files) of user home directories (/home) are made every night. All versions of a file for the last 90 days are available from backup, a deleted file remains in backup for 365 days before it expires.

The following files are excluded from backup:

• files named "core". If you value your corefiles, you should compress them with e.g. gzip or bzip2. Then they will get another name (core.gz or core.bz2) and will get included in backup.
• files ending with the extension ".o". These are typically temporary object files generated during compilation.
• contents of (sub)directories named tmp, TMP, temp, TEMP or scratch. Do not put any valuable data in such directories.

Backups are not made of directories for temporary storage (e.g. /work or /scratch).

Retrieving files from backup

dsmc is the command to restore files from backup. The command can be used by all users (not only root) provided you have read and write permissions on the files that you want to restore.

For the IBM Regatta (tre), only files in /home/parallab and /migrate are backed up. Files in /home/parallab should be restored on tre.ii.uib.no, while files in /migrate should be restored on to.ii.uib.no.

For the IBM e1350 cluster (fimm), only files in /home/fimm are backed up.

To get usage information, execute

   # dsmc help

Retrieving files from backup requires some time (depending on e.g. file size and workload of the tape robot) and can take between a few seconds and several minutes.

Examples

For tre, to restore the latest available version of the file /home/parallab/plab/janfrode/smit.log, execute:

   # dsmc restore /home/parallab/plab/janfrode/smit.log

If you need to restore an older version of a file use:

   # dsmc restore -inac -pick /home/parallab/plab/janfrode/smit.log

Select the version you want to restore, and restore it.

For fimm, please note that one has to use /export/fimm/. E.g.,

   # dsmc restore /export/fimm/plab/janfrode/smit.log

Multiple files can be restored using wildcards (e.g., on tre):

   # dsmc restore '/home/parallab/plab/janfrode/smit.*'

Important options to dsmc are:

   -sub=yes  # can be used to restore a whole file tree
   -pick     # gives interactive mode to select which files to restore
   -inac     # select from older versions of files

Problems restoring files? Send problem report to hpc-support@hpc.uib.no.