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 over the next week. If the file is on a different filesystem, that file cannot be recovered unless backups are being performed for that directory.

Method

Basics

• Change directory to /snapshot/$DAYOFWEEK
  • DAYOFWEEK is the day of the week that you want to recover from. This is the written day of the week in lowercase, i.e. wednesday, thursday, etc.
• Copy file(s) as needed back to the main home directory.

Video demo

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

Example

• Username: billybob
• Date: Wednesday

Let us say that that you have accidentally deleted a file in your home area called /home/billybob/bobFiles/important.txt. You know that file was on there yesterday, so you should be able to recover it.

[billybob@login1 ~]$ cd /home/billybob/bobFiles
also_important.txt    not_so_important.txt
[billybob@login1 ~/bobFiles]$ ls
important.txt     also_important.txt    not_so_important.txt
[billybob@login1 ~/bobFiles]$ cd /snapshot/tuesday/bobFiles
[billybob@login1 /snapshot/tuesday/bobFiles]$ ls
important.txt     also_important.txt    not_so_important.txt
[billybob@login1 /snapshot/tuesday/bobFiles]$ cp important.txt /home/billybob/bobFiles/important.txt
[billybob@login1 /snapshot/tuesday/bobFiles]$ cd /home/billybob/bobFiles
[billybob@login1 ~/bobFiles]$ ls
important.txt     also_important.txt    not_so_important.txt