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ECI Backup Offerings and Policy

ECI Backup Offerings and Policy

Endpoint/User Backups

Endpoint/User/Client Backup to Cloud

 

Overall Strategy

ECI funds Crashplan licensing for College of Engineering faculty and staff.  Each user can protect up to four computers.

 

  • Windows, Mac, Linux supported.

  • Automatic/continuous backup of specified resources (not full system).

  • Self-service restore/file recovery.

  • Protection from malicious or accidental deletion.

  • Encrypted in transit and at rest.

  • Four devices per user/account.

  • Nominally unlimited storage (1TB in practice) (TBD).


Tape Backups

High-capacity/density and lower-cost backups offered to individual research projects.

 

Overall Strategy

ECI intends to strongly encourage and perhaps mandate in the future that all research projects within the College of Engineering centrally backup their research data.  For any size datasets, but especially for larger datasets (greater than 10TB), ECI intends to offer the ability to backup all data to LTO-8 tape.

 

  • Modernized iteration of existing ECI (bacula) offering.

  • Large capacity LTO-8 tape library - 480TB Native (uncompressed).

  • Retention policy varies per dataset according to size and rate of data change.

  • Future flexibility.


Infrastructure Backups

Robust backups of Virtual Machines hosted by ECI.  Tightly integrated with existing ECI virtualization infrastructure.  Currently backing up ECI infrastructure, designated instructional resources, and several research datasets.

 

Overall Strategy

Primary (D2D) Nightly → Secondary (D2D) Nightly → Offline/Archive (Tape) Weekly

 

Primary Backups

Nightly disk-to-disk (D2D) backups.

Server Housed Locally

SSD Storage

Retention Policy:

  • Last 5 Daily Backups

  • Last 6 Weekly Backups

  • Last 12 Monthly Backups

  • Last 3 Yearly Backups

 

Secondary Backups

Nightly D2D syncs of primary server (above) to secondary server.

Housed in alternate datacenter

HDD Storage

Retention Policy:

  • Last 5 Daily Backups

  • Last 4 Weekly Backups

  • Last 3 Monthly Backups

(shorter retention policies are intentional vs primary)

 

Archive (Tape) Backups

Weekly Backup of Primary Datastore to Encrypted LTO-8 Tape

Stored Offline and Offsite

Retention Policy:

  • Last 4 Weekly Backups

  • Last 3 Monthly Backups

  • Last 12 Quarterly Backups

  • Annual (~Jan 1) Backups Retained Indefinitely