Recovering Lost Files
Every night, starting at 12:01am, files stored in SCC home directories, Project Disk Space, and STASH are copied into an area called snapshots and each daily snapshot is retained for 15 days on the file system. You have access to the snapshots of your files, making them useful and convenient for retrieving files that are accidentally deleted. The snapshots do not count against your storage allocation.
Each directory contains a hidden subdirectory called .snapshots. It is not visible in an ls -a listing, but you can cd into it:
scc1 ~% cd .snapshots
scc1 ~% ls
160514/ 160515/ 160516/ 160517/
The directory names use the form YYMMDD to represent the day that the snapshot was created. Choose a day and then cd into that snapshot directory. Use ls -a to list the contents. Once you have found the files and directories you want to recover, use the cp command to copy the files/directories to your project directory on the file system. You can not edit or delete files under .snapshots.
Additionally, the home directory and /project (excludes /projectnb) snapshots are copied to an offsite location and retained for 180 day, but these snapshots are not accessible by you. If you need access to these snapshots, please email us at help@scc.bu.edu. These snapshots are saved offsite for the purpose of Disaster Recovery Protection. For example, if the MGHPCC facility suffers damage from a natural disaster that damages the onsite file storage system, then the files can be restored from the unaffected offsite backup location.
For a general overview of the policies, see the Data Loss Protections Policies summary table.