Self-Service File Recovery

For files on the Grad/Research Net only, we have the capacity for you to recover old versions of changed or deleted files yourself, from our online backups. If the files were on the Ugrad Net, or if the below instructions don't work, please see Requesting Restoration of a Deleted File.

How to Restore a File

• Log in to one of our Grad Net Linux clients.

• Go to the /users/backups directory (either using cd in a terminal or your preferred graphical file manager).
  • Each subdirectory there is a separate backup; the name of the subdirectory gives the date and time the backup was made. (e.g. 2017-10-20-102500 contains a backup made at 10:25 am on Friday, October 20th, 2017.)

• Go into the directory containing the backup you want to use.

• The backup contains a complete copy of all of our home directories; go into yours (it should match your account name).

• From here, find the file or files you want to restore.

• Copy the files from the backup into your home directory.

If You're Not Sure Which Backup to Use

From a shell, you can use wildcards in the /users/backups directory to look at all of the backups of a particular file at once.

For example, if your account name is account and you realize you accidentally deleted a file named example from your homework directory, you could run these commands in a terminal:

cd /users/backups
ls -l */account/homework/example

This will take a little while to finish--it takes time to access each backup in turn--and it might give output looking something like this:

...
-rw-r--r--. 1 account users 848 Apr 15  2017 2017-10-09-000000/account/homework/example
-rw-r--r--. 1 account users 848 Apr 15  2017 2017-10-09-040000/account/homework/example
-rw-r--r--. 1 account users 848 Apr 15  2017 2017-10-09-080000/account/homework/example
-rw-r--r--. 1 account users 848 Apr 15  2017 2017-10-09-120000/account/homework/example
-rw-r--r--. 1 account users 848 Apr 15  2017 2017-10-09-160000/account/homework/example
-rw-r--r--. 1 account users 850 Oct  9 16:58 2017-10-09-200000/account/homework/example
-rw-r--r--. 1 account users 850 Oct  9 16:58 2017-10-10-000000/account/homework/example
-rw-r--r--. 1 account users 850 Oct  9 16:58 2017-10-10-040000/account/homework/example
-rw-r--r--. 1 account users 850 Oct  9 16:58 2017-10-10-080000/account/homework/example
-rw-r--r--. 1 account users 850 Oct  9 16:58 2017-10-10-120000/account/homework/example
-rw-r--r--. 1 account users 850 Oct  9 16:58 2017-10-10-160000/account/homework/example

If the output ended there, you can see that the file was modified on October 9th and, if there are backups more recent than 4pm on October 10th, deleted on the 10th. You could use the 2017-10-10-160000 backup to get the file as it existed shortly before it was deleted, or you could use the 2017-10-09-160000 backup to get the file as it was before it was changed on the 9th.

Backup Availability

We make backups of all of our files every five minutes. Most of those backups are only kept for a few hours. (If we kept them indefinitely, we'd run out of storage space very quickly!) Some, however, are kept for days, weeks, months, and even years.

In general, the further back in time you go, the further apart our online backups are. If you need a file that was deleted an hour ago, you might be able to choose from backups that are just minutes apart from each other. If, on the other hand, you need a file that was deleted a year ago, you might have to choose among backups that are weeks apart.

Our offline backups operate a different rate from the online ones, so if there's a file you can't recover from the online backups, you can contact us to request restoration and we'll see if it's available in the offline backups.