Backup and data recovery options
When hard drives go bad, losing research data, documents
and email can be catastrophic.
Because data recovery shops like Ontrack and DriveSavers can charge from $1500 to $10000 to recover information from "dead" or damaged hard drives, we have established a departmental backup server for faculty office machines and administrative staff machines.
This service covers SAS Computing allocation workstations given to faculty, with cost on a per-user basis, and administrative allocation workstations given to administrative staff in the facilities, business, academic and graduate offices.
This server does not at present perform backup service for research lab workstations. Please browse our document regarding research lab server support for information on this level of service.
Support
Please refer to these Computing Support FAQ documents for installation, configuration and troubleshooting on the following platforms:
Costs
This service presently costs $500 per faculty member and covers backup procedures, data recovery and software maintenance over a three-year period for one workstation.
Platforms and networking
We can back up workstations running Apple Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows 2000 or XP Professional , and Red Hat Linux. We can perform backups over a wireless 802.11b/g connection, or a wired 10 Mbit or 100 Mbit network connection (standard in Biology). We recommend using wired 100 Mbit, where available, as this reduces the initial backup time considerably.
Backup process
Briefly, an initial backup is made of the full contents of the workstation, which can take 1-3 days to complete, depending on the quantity of data and the network connection speed. Thereafter, daily incremental backups are made, which capture new or changed files. Please note the important usage guidelines in the Support section below, which explain what to do in the event of data loss.
Additional information
Please email us at bio-computing@sas.upenn.edu if you are interested in registering.
