Backup Practices¶

Ideal setup:¶

Regular computer backup¶

To protect your program installation.

Full backup of the databases every night¶

The database is the metadata generated by Leginon named "dbemdata" in the installation
example.

Full/Incremental/differential backup of the images¶

The image files located in [your storage disk] should be backup in full at least once
a month, and nightly in differential or incremental mode.

Current NRAMM setup:¶

Because our tape backup system is not on-site and the data have to transfer over slow
network to perform the task, we have not been able to backup in the ideal setting. Here is
what we currently do:

Regular computer backup¶

TSRI Research Computing provides regular back up service that does full backup of the
computers every four weeks and incremental backup every night. The full backup expires in
4 months and the incremental backup one month. We do this for the computers running
Leginon main program, the database server, as well as the web server.

Regular backup & tar of the databases every night¶

On top of the TSRI backup, we also tar the database everynight and store it on the
institutional tape library.

rsync to a tape library of the image storage disk¶

As our image storage disks total 15T byte, we currently use rsync function to update a
copy on our institutional tape library. It creates new files, updates old files, but does
not remove old files on the tape if it is removed on the storage disk. We do not think
this is the best solution since it is not possible to retrieve old files that have been
modified on a later time.