Recovering Files

Recovering Files

Sometimes, you may have deleted your files accidentally and you want to recover them.

Important Note: Always double check before you are deleting your directories. The files in /home directory are only protected by snapshots at this moment. Please exercise more than typical care when removing files from /home. We will notify you once the backup is fully functional again.

On Research Storage system 

/home directory

You can retrieve the files from 7 days snapshots residing at your home directory /home/<CaseID>/.snapshot.  The snapshot process initiates at 11pm nightly, and takes some time (it is not instantaneous to compare changes to the reference). Note that we can not recover files that are created and deleted within a short period that does not all it to be captured in the "overnight" snapshot process. 

Snapshot:

ls /home/<caseID>/.snapshot

output:

Home_2025-07-25_16_00_00_UTC  Home_2025-08-08_16_00_00_UTC  Home_2025-08-12_06_00_00_UTC  Home_2025-08-14_06_00_00_UTC  Home_2025-08-15_16_00_00_UTC  Home_2025-08-17_06_00_00_UTC

Home_2025-08-01_16_00_00_UTC  Home_2025-08-11_06_00_00_UTC  Home_2025-08-13_06_00_00_UTC  Home_2025-08-15_06_00_00_UTC  Home_2025-08-16_06_00_00_UTC  Home_2025-08-18_06_00_00_UTC

(Note: The '.snapshot' will not tab-complete, it must be typed directly.)

Recover

Copy back your directory to your home directory. 

cp -r Home_<timestamp>/<path-to-directory-to-be-restored> .

Example: Copying all hidden files from the snapshot (preserving the source permission)

cp -rp /home/<caseID>/.snapshot/Home_<time-stamp>/.[^.]* .

Want to do a "diff" between 2 snapshot folders?

diff -bur Home_<time_stamp>/ Home_<time_stamp>/

/scratch

If you have deleted files from your scratch directory accidentally, you cannot recover them.
Files on /scratch remain if the timestamp is within 14 days, so older files will need to be updated/touched.
Newly copied files will also need to be assigned the new timestamp and should not keep the original timestamp.

/mnt/vstor

A lot of data stored on the Research Storage Vstor is protected by the "snapshot" process. To recover files or directories, cd close to the directory of interest as possible. For example, if a directory "example" is missing in the path /mnt/vstor/example/, check the directory:

$ ls /mnt/vstor/example

archive/    code/    data/     papers/

You know that the directory "papers" was deleted from there. Now, CD to that directory and then to .snapshots

cd /mnt/vstor/example

cd .snapshot

Check the time stamps:

$ ls

vstor_2025-08-11_05_00_00_UTC

vstor_2025-08-12_05_00_00_UTC

vstor_2025-08-13_05_00_00_UTC

...

Now list the contents of these 'snapshot' directories to find the missing directory from the appropriate time stamp.

ls vstor_2025-08-11_05_00_00_UTC

papers/     ...

To recover, perform 'cp' into your working directory.

cp -r vstor_2025-08-11_05_00_00_UTC/papers  /mnt/vstor/example/

Make sure that the papers directory is copied.

ls /mnt/vstor/example

...   papers/