Researcher's and Research Centres may protect their research work and data by saving and maintaintin a copy on the HPC system.

This service is NOT suitable for protecting and restoring the Computer Operating system and configuration. If you need complete protection for your Computer, ITS can provide a complete System Backup service.

• Individual researcher's may backup data from their PC to their HPC account.
• Research Centre's with larger data sets may requests a HPC "Data Service Account". This is a restricted use account that provides greater speed and capacity to backup servers and large data sets.

The data backup may be executed in several ways and is managed by the client. The HPC group can not monitor the backups to ensure the save is successful and complete. Similarly we are unable to monitor that a backup is being performed regularly. If you require that service, contact ITS.

Below are some of the different aims for your backup. We also provide some example client programs .

Protect your data from Computer or disk failure

Maintaining a copy of your data will ensure it is available if your computer or disk fails, are damaged or stolen. A single up-to date copy stored separately is usually sufficient to ensure your project can survive those events. 

Protect your data set from Computer failure and data corruption.

While the events above are usually immediately known, data corruption may be subtle and not immediately detected. Historical copies of data are necessary since the latest copy will include the corruption.

Data may be updated weekly or daily.

Saving multiple versions can quickly create a huge amount of storage, so some precautions and limits are necessary.

• Old versions should be retained for a limited time. Usually 3 months is sufficient to ensure any problem is discovered. 
• Multiple versions may be saved efficiently, by saving only the daily file changes. This is called a incremental.
• The HPC system saves these backups more efficiently if each save is bundled into a single "save set file". Several programs are avilable that support this.