Investors can purchase data protection by selecting one of the following data backup services. These services are charged separately from Research Computing compute services. The most cost-effective way to use these services is for the research group to select a single directory for backup, and to place all data to be backed up within the chosen directory.

Data protection with tape

UFIT RC has partnered with UFIT Infrastructure Communication Technologies (ICT) in order to provide their Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) tape backup service for data stored on UFRC systems. The cost for data storage on tape is $78/TB/year. As such this service is billed differently than UFIT RC provided services, in that clients are charged for usage rather than purchasing a certain amount of capacity. Investors must set up an account with ICT to pay for the monthly charges,

After a research group has chosen a directory for backup, tape backups will occur once per day in incremental fashion – for each file that has changed since the previous backup, a new copy is written to tape. Up to seven versions of the same file can exist, and individual versions kept for 60 days. As long as the file exists on disk, at least one version will be kept on tape. If the file is deleted, the last version on tape will be removed after 90 days.

If you are interested in tape backup for your group, please notify us by opening a support ticket.

Data protection on home directories

Home directories offer the advantage of having one week of daily snapshots available, which can be accessed by the user to recover older versions of files or accidentally deleted files. More information about the home directory snapshots can be seen on our wiki page about snapshots.