UO Cloud backup

UO Cloud Backup

We have an easily accessible cloud backup that is mounted from one of the data transfer nodes on talapas from which you can move data from talapas (or anywhere) onto the UO Cloud storage. This is meant to be cold storage, meaning it is a place to put data that you will not access frequently. By way of example

# login to talapas, below is my alias to ssh [email protected]
$ talapas
# from talapas log in to the data transfer node
$ ssh dtn01
# a welcome message from this node follows
$ df -h /uocloud/kernlab/
Filesystem                             Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
10.223.40.4:/racs_nfs_kernlab/kernlab  9.8T  5.3T  4.5T  55% /uocloud/kernlab

make your own directories in there, preferably under your own username. we can expand this space as needed.

Automate your backups

To take it the next step, you should set up automated backups using rsync and cron job. A very basic rsync script might look like this (use your own directory names of course). Let's imagine it's called rsyncScript.sh

rsync -zavP /projects/kernlab/adkern/ /uocloud/kernlab/adkern/

and to run this I will have to log in to dtn01 and run it directly with something like ./rsyncScript.sh. that's a pain to have to do again and again so instead i'll set up a cron job to do this for me. To do this I will edit the crontab file and add my job. Note this has to be done on dtn01 so that the uocloud mount is available

crontab -e

and then i'll add to this currently empty file a line that tells cron when to run my backupscript

0 0 * * * bash /home/adkern/rsyncScript.sh

the crontab file has it's own weird format for specifying when to run jobs. you can check it out with man crontab. This example though is set to run my backup script everynight at midnight. Now my backups are automated and everyday my directory in /projects will be backedup to UO Cloud.