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Backup / Restore
With the central backup service the Center for Computing and Communication offers the opportunity for all institutes of the RWTH Aachen University to backup their data (including file versioning) and to restore the backed up data in a reliable way.
The operational experience since 1998 shows that copying files from one or several computers can be done with little effort. Only in the case of a restore (that can be the version from the day before yesterday or the whole 5TB-filesystem of a fileserver) the boundary conditions of the time the data was saved are important.
By considering this boundary conditions the Center for Computing and Communication is able to store large amounts of your important data. For this purpose a powerful server infrastructure with the IBM software "Tivoli Storage Manager" (TSM) is in use. With an appropriate backup concept, that in the best case is managed in close co-operation between the institutes of RWTH Aachen University and the CCC, it is possible to create the preconditions to restore data in a fast way if it is needed.
There are several advantages in using this service:
- there are no costs for one's own backup hardware
- the effort in persons to maintain one's own backup system does not apply
- the data is stored automatically and can therefore not be forgotten (the computer has to be switched on and the TSM software has to be configured for automatic backup)
- the data is stored on a server within the Center for Computing and Communication so it is secured even if the whole computer sector of your institute is destroyed
Only business critical data should be backed up, because in case of data loss the restore is optimized (necessary data is quickly available) and valuable resources (storage capacity) can be used to backup a larger amount of critical data. Further details on the reasonable selection and the possibility to influence the amount of data that is to be stored can be found under the point “data storage“.
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