Protecting Your Data




	Protecting Your Data Not all RTDC disks are backed up Currently, the RTDC backs up home directories and the SMA raw data archive. Home directories generally have a quota of 40G, but more can be requested. (Please speak to Shoshana K. Rosenthal). We do NOT back up: Pool areas AIPS disks Your machine Disk failure and how to protect yourself Recently, an SMA pool disk failed and at least 3 users lost several weeks worth of work. Over the years, there have been other failures, including entire AIPS disks and data files spread randomly over several disks. An AIPS file is knit together from a number of unix extensions (each one a disk file) by the AIPS software, so if one of these unix extensions becomes unreadable, the whole AIPS file is compromised. We are working towards backing up the pool areas, but in the meantime (and even afterwards), there are ways to protect yourself: Keep a script of your MIR or MIRIAD commands OR a log file of your AIPS processing commands. These are tiny files and can be copied to a secure backup location. Back up important AIPS and SMA data products. Instructions for backing up your data to tape are given here. The CF's policy for backing up pool areas The Computation Facility (CF) does NOT back up it's pool areas. It does, however, have a few NetApp based pool areas which have (very) short-term snapshots. Please see http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/cf/services/unix/System_Resources/pool.html for details.