The Helix systems are backed up regularly by the Operations staff. Full backups of home directories are done weekly, and incremental backups are done daily. These tapes are kept onsite for four weeks. Every four weeks a special full backup of home directories is done and sent offsite; these tapes are kept for eight weeks.

E-mail backups are done at night; e-mail messages that are lost the same day that they were created would not have been backed up yet and therefore can not be restored. Snapshots (software backups) are done every six hours on home directories; therefore even files that were lost on the same day that they were created can most often be restored.

If you need to have files restored, you can either try to follow the easy instructions below or send e-mail to our staff at staff@helix.nih.gov.

Recover files in home directory

1. Log into your helix account, go to your home directory:

% cd

2. Assume that you are going to restore the files in your home directory, type:

% cd .snapshot

3. Select the time frame when your files still existed. There are 3 time categories: hourly, nightly, and weekly. Each category has several backup times. For example, _nightly.0 contains files from last night, _nightly.1 contains files from the night before, _weekly.0 contains the most recent week, _weekly.1 contains the week before, etc.

4. Go to selected directory:

% cd _weekly.0/

5. Then find the file(s) you are interested in and copy them to your current home directory:

% cp lostfile /home/HelixUserID/lostfile

Recover files in data directory

Go to your data directory, then type cd .snapshot , select the time frame and continue as above.