Snapshots

Purpose

Describe how home area snapshots can be used to recover lost files

Affected Storage

Only data stored in /home/$USERNAME are managed with snapshots. If a file is lost in this filesystem, it can be recovered from daily intervals over the past week. It can be recovered on a weekly basis for the past 30 days. If the file is on a different filesystem (e.g. /blue or /orange), that file cannot be recovered unless backups are being performed for that directory.

Method

Basics

• Change directory to /home/$USERNAME/.snapshot where $USERNAME is your username
• You will see at least seven directories, each with a day of the week in the name. If the current day is Friday, the directory labeled ##_friday_home will be the snapshot from 5:00am today.
• You may also see a couple ##_weekly_home directories. These are taken every Monday morning at 3:00am and kept for 30 days.
• Change directory to the snapshot you wish to restore from and navigate to your missing file.
• Copy the file(s) as needed back to your main home directory.

Video demo

Here is a video demo of the process of restoring from a snapshot.

Example

• Username: it-rc-test
• Day: Wednesday

Suppose you have accidentally deleted a file in your home area called /home/it-rc-test/test/important.txt. You know that file was on there yesterday, so you should be able to recover it.

[it-rc-test@login1 ~]$ ls /home/it-rc-test/test
important.txt     also_important.txt    not_so_important.txt
[it-rc-test@login1 ~]$ rm -rf important.txt
[it-rc-test@login1 ~]$ ls /home/it-rc-test/test
also_important.txt    not_so_important.txt
[it-rc-test@login1 ~]$ cd /home/it-rc-test/test
[it-rc-test@login1 ~/test]$ ls .snapshot
56_sunday_home  57_monday_home  58_tuesday_home  59_wednesday_home  60_thursday_home  61_friday_home
[it-rc-test@login1 ~/test]$ cd .snapshot/58_tuesday_home
[it-rc-test@login1 ~/test/.snapshot/58_tuesday_home]$ ls
important.txt     also_important.txt    not_so_important.txt
[it-rc-test@login1 ~/test/.snapshot/58_tuesday_home]$ cp important.txt /home/it-rc-test/test/important.txt
[it-rc-test@login1 ~/test/.snapshot/58_tuesday_home]$ cd /home/it-rc-test/test
[it-rc-test@login1 ~/test]$ ls
important.txt     also_important.txt    not_so_important.txt