Backup Policy

Different storage areas on Anunna come with very different backup guarantees. Knowing which is which is essential: some areas are never backed up, and data lost there cannot be recovered. This page summarises the situation; the page for each storage area gives more context.

Storage	Backed up?	Notes
/home	Yes. With a managed backup solution that allows file-level restore	Good for configuration files and small results you can't afford to lose.
/lustre/nobackup	No.	The default Lustre area; cheaper, but lost data cannot be recovered. Keep your own copies of anything important.
/lustre/backup	Yes — a second copy on a separate machine.	A disaster-recovery copy, not a versioned backup. It may help revert a mistake if you report it very quickly, but there is no guarantee.
/lustre/scratch	No.	Temporary area; files may be purged automatically (typically after 30 days).
/archive	Yes — to tape, restorable from roughly a week of history (same schedule as /home).	Warm storage on the login nodes, for WUR users.

Recommendations

• Treat /lustre/nobackup and /lustre/scratch as expendable. Anything you cannot regenerate should also live somewhere that is backed up, or be archived to tape — see Archival Storage.
• A "backup" tier protects against hardware disaster, not against your own mistakes. If you delete something by accident, report it immediately; recovery is best-effort.

See also

• Storage Systems Overview
• Home Directory
• Compute Storage
• Archival Storage
• Quotas