Linux System Backups

If you are member of one of the following groups the Linux machines you use are on a backup system

  • Seismology
    • - all contents on all Linux machines owned by Susan Schwartz, Thorne Lay, Ru-Shan Wu, Emily Brodsky
    • - excludes the machines mipio, fwi, and rtm
  • HydroSci
    • - all contents on all Linux machines owned by Andy Fisher and Slawek Tulaczyk
  • Jon Zehr
    • - all contents on all Linux machines owned by Jon Zehr
  • Francis Nimmo
    • - all contents on all Linux machines owned by Francis Nimmo
  • Chris Edwards and Andy Moore
    • - only for individual directories added by request
  • All user home directories that are hosted on the machine homeserver1

Excluding Data from Backup

The resources required for backups are significant including:

  • - a large computational load on the machine being backed up
    • (particularly if there is large amounts of data that most be compared and backed up)
  • - large storage and computation resources are on the backup servers

Because the resources required for backups are significant we strongly encourage users to exclude from backup any data that does not require backup. Some examples of such data are:

  • - Any data that can be retrieved from internet repositories
  • - Any data that can be easily and reasonably quickly regenerated via computation
  • - Any data that is temporary or intermediate data generated by computation

How To Exclude Data from Backup

Any directory (and it's nested files and subdirectories) can be excluded from backup by simply including the string "nobackup" (all lowercase) anywhere in the directory's name. Additionally, any individual file with the string "nobackup" (all lowercase) anywhere in it's name will be excluded.

For example, the following directories (and all their contents and subdirectories) will not be backed up:

  • - /proj/myproject/dataset1.nobackup/
  • - /proj/myproject/dataset2/nobackup_subdata1/
  • - /home/me/matlabresults/resultsnobackup/
  • - /home/me/nobackup/
  • - /home/me/data_crunching/nobackup.temp

In addition to this method of excluding data, the individual directories backed up in Chris Edward's and Andy Moore's group continue to use the .backup_exclude file for specifying files to exclude.