Backup policy

The CS systems administrators take regular tape backups of all files that you save in your home directory. These are the guarentees we can make on our ability to recover your data:

• We rotate through a full set of tapes in five weeks. This means that if you lost your data within five weeks of requesting the recovery, we can recover it down to the day.
• Every month we take a full backup and archive that tape in our fire-proof safe. We rotate through a set of four tapes, so we can always recover the last four months of data.
• We take a full backup at the end of every semester (including summer). We rotate through three tapes, so we can recover this set of files down to the semester.
• We take a full backup on the first of every year, and store that tape indefinitely.

We can make no other guarentees about the recovery of data. As always, the sooner you inform us of the problem, the greater the chance that we will be able to recover your data.