Protecting Your Data

RTDC areas that are backed up

• Home directories (weekly)
• The SMA raw data archive

RTDC areas that are NOT backed up

• Your machine (home directories are housed on a common server, not your machine)
• AIPS disks
• All other pool areas

Disk failure and protecting your data

• Back up your data to your own disk drive (1 TB disks can be purchased for < $100).
• Keep copies of your AIPS, MIR, MIRIAD, or CASA scripts, which tend to be small, in a separate location. Reproducing data products would then be relatively simple.

Note: Data written to older media, such as DLT, EXABYTE, 9-track, 7-track, etc., may still be recoverable, but cannot be read at the CfA.


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.