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How to recover an accidentally delete file/folder and backup data on scratch

/home/fs0, /vols/Data, /ohba/ sn​apshots

The local snapshots on the home, /vols/Data and /ohba/* file systems are browseable on the access computer (e.g. jalapeno.fmrib.ox.ac.uk for home and /vols/Data and hbafs0-gw.ohba.ox.ac.uk in OHBA). To access these snapshots you need to visit a hidden folder .zfs in the root of the share; for /vols/Data and /ohba/* shares this will be the shared folder, e.g. /vols/Data/myproject or /ohba/projects/myproject. The snapshots of the home folders are in /home/fs0/.zfs

Within this hidden folder you will find a sub-folder snapshot and within that date-stamped snapshot folders, e.g.

/home/fs0/.zfs/snapshot/autosnap_2023-02-26_19:21:00_hourly

NB The timestamp is US format, e.g. YYYY-MM-DD

In the case of home folders you will need to cd into <snapshotname>/<username>/ to see your files.

To recover files, simply copy out of the appropriate snapshot folder back to the original location (or other location as appropriate).

Older backups

For backups from earlier time points please computing-help@win.ox.ac.uk for advice.​

Limitations

The snapshot system remembers the state of the file system at the point in time that the snapshot is taken, if your file/folder did not exist at the time the last snapshot was taken then it will not have been backed up.

Due to bandwidth limitations and operational constraints we do not guarantee that the snapshot regime is always adhered to.

Protecting Data on Scratch

Scratch is not intended to provide any significant protection against file deletion/overwrites. Any important, unchanging (or rarely changing) data should ideally be moved to /vols/Data, but you can also use the tape archive facility to make user driven point-in-time backups of a folder. Please note that we do not routinely delete archives from tape, so please be considerate in your use of this option so as to not fill the resource we have.

To take an archive of a folder without removing it from disk, you may use the -k option to the archive command - see Archiving Data.