Backup

IMPORTANT: SURFdrive doesn't provide a backup. It is adviced to backup your SURFdrive with one of the below solutions.

Backup solutions provided by RU

The backup solution provided by the RU mentioned below do a daily backup, but also keep a backup version long term. Backups are also kept in two locations.

Home share

Your Home share is automatically backed up by C&CZ with a daily, monthly and yearly backup. So if you by accident deleted a file few months ago, you can still recover it.

Amanda backup server to backup Mac OS X/Linux/Windows clients

C&CZ runs an amanda backup server to backup Mac OS X/Linux/Windows clients. The backups are made with the Amanda open source network backup software. Amanda can back up a large number of workstations running multiple versions of Unix/Mac OS X/Linux/Windows.

Specific settings for the C&CZ configuration:

• The amanda client should listen to the non-standard port 10011 instead of 10080. Change /etc/services to reflect this.
• The amanda server is bus.science.ru.nl. Allow this server to access the client in /etc/amandahosts and the only_from line in /etc/init.d/xinetd.

In the summer of 2013 C&CZ has renewed their amanda backup system. They can now backup partitions till 200 Gb in size. Bigger partitions may be possible using an exclude file which specifies several directories to exclude from backup.

Backup solutions you can implement yourself

Good practices:

• have backups at two different locations.
  Reason: if you only do backups at home and your house burns down, then both your laptop and your backup drive will be lost!!
• have an offline backup next to an online backup. Offline means not connected to your backup, whereas online means connected to your laptop.
  Reason: an online backup can also be infected if your laptop is infected, but an offline backup is not connected, and therefor is safe from corruption such as ransom ware.

Local backup to an external hard disk (online)

You can do the backups yourself, either by making a copy manually, or automate the backup with a backup client provided with your operating system:

• Windows 10: File History
• Mac OS X : Time Machine
• Linux : Back In Time

Note: it is always safer to have backups at two locations, so it is adviced to do backup to an external disk at home and at work.

Keep a long term backup (offline)

It is wise to make once a year a full backup to an external drive which you store in a safe place. Even better do this on two different external disks at two different locations to provide redundancy, because a disk make break, or may be destroyed in a fire. This is a long term backup, where you can return to in case of real disaster.

This is important because

• a virus/ransomware on your computer which can cripple both your current data on your laptop and the backups of your data on your external backup disk. Remember that the backup disk is connected to your laptop, and accessible the virus/ransomware. Whereas the long term backup is stored in a safe place out of reach of the virus. You could say the offline backup acts as safe fallback in these special cases.
• online backups only allow you to recover deleted files within a period of one year. If you by accident deleted a file which you only rarely access, and you discover this file is missing more then a year later after the accidental deletion, this file will probably not available anymore in the above mentioned backup systems which only will keep backups for a year. However it will be on your long term backup!! You could say the offline backup acts as an archive in such a case.