Home directories

If you accidently erase a file in your home directoy at RFC, you can restore it using a two week backup that you can access directly. Two weeks worth of backups are kept as snapshots. The way it works is that as day pass, live backups are being made on the file system itself hence preserving your files in-place.

For example, your username is 123, your home directory is /star/u/123 and you erased a file /star/u/123/somedir/importantfile.txt and now realise that was a mistake. Don't panic. This is not the end of thw world as snapshot backups exist.

Simply look under /star/u/.snapshot

The directory names are odered by the date and time of backup. Pick a date when the file existed and under there is a copy of your home directory from that day. From here you can restore the file, i.e,

% cp /star/u/.snapshot/20yy-mm-dd_hhxx-mmxx.Daily_Backups_STAR-FS05/123/somedir/importantfile.txt 
/star/u/123/somedir/importantfile.txt

See also starsofi #7363.

AFS areas

Each doc_proected/ AFS areas also have a .backup volume which keeps recently deleted files in that directory until a real AFS based backup is made (then the content is deleted and you will need to ask the RCF to restore your files).  Finding it is tricky though because there is one such directory per volume. The best is to backward search for that directory. For example, let's suppose you are working in /afs/rhic.bnl.gov/star/doc_protected/www/bulkcorr/. If you bacward search for a .backup directory, you will find one as /afs/rhic.bnl.gov/star/doc_protected/www/bulkcorr/../.backup/ and this is where the files for this AFS volume will go upon deletion.

Other areas

Other areas are typically not backed-up.