Scheduled Backups of H: Drives and Ramifications for Files Restore Requests

Server backup schedule

Server Name Users Involved Incremental Backups Full Backups
Rhine Students 2am daily (5 min.) Sundays (1 hr.20 min.)
Tiber Faculty and Staff 1am Tues-Sun (10-15 min.) Mondays (2 hrs. 40 min.)

Incremental vs. full backups

An incremental backup means that only files that have been modified since the previous backup are copied. A full backup means that all files are copied.

What this means for users

There is a gap of time between backups during which a user's file can be lost permanently (i.e., without any hope of getting a copy via file restore request) if the user creates the file after a backup has been run and then deletes or overwrites that file prior to the next scheduled backup. For example, if a student creates a file at 6:30am on Wednesday and then accidentally deletes or overwrites that file before 2:00am on Thursday, we won't be able to retrieve a backup copy of that file for the student because a backup would never have been made.