Data Backup

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Tape Backup | CD Backup | DVD Backup | Firewire | Laptop Backup | Mac Users | SnapServer

Backing up your data properly is as important as collecting good data in the first place. As soon as you complete a project, you should back up your data to tapes, CD, DVD, or a firewire/usb drive. Network connections are available to transfer data directly to a laptop. Many users are also transferring their data by ftp to their home institution.

Although users are ultimately responsible for backing-up their own data, BioCARS attempts to store the data for about 3 months. Please contact any staff member if you have additional questions.

Tape Backup

Each BioCARS station has two different kinds of tape drive:

To back up data to a tape drive, go to the top directory for a project, and type:
tar cvf {device_name} {directory_name}, where {device_name} is the name of the drive that you are using.

The name is located on each tape drive is different for SGI and Linux. It is important to check if the data are successfully written to tapes by listing it out (tar tvf). There are instances in which users could not read the tapes that they took home.

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CD Backup

The three Linux machines (bm14cbu, bm14dbu, and id14bbu) in the computer room are setup with CD-writers that are available to all users. Users can log on to the computer with any of the three user accounts (userbmc, userbmd, or useridb) and the regular password.

The CD-writers can write a full CD in approximately 6 minutes although extra time may be needed if your are precaching your data.

CDR disks can be manufactured in several different ways using different technologies. Because of this, it is possible that some CDR disks will not work properly in our drive (although everything has worked so far).

Also, it is possible that the newly written disk will not be readable on every CD drive even though the data gets written properly with our writer. These problems are well documented and occur with all brands of writers and CDR's. Writers and CDR's made in the last year or so appear to be much better in this regard but no guaranties can be with respect to your data.

It is strongly recommended that you read your new CD on one of the SGI's to make sure that everything worked correctly.

More information can found at http://www.cdrfaq.org/.

Note!!!
Your data is located in two different places on our network: in /data which is on a computer on the roof of the complex and in /sump which is a local disk on the backup computer. You should use the data in the /sump directory so that you don't encounter any network delays while you are burning your CD's.

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DVD Backup

Home › Facilities › Computer Resources › Data Backup › DVD Backup

To backup your data, log into one of the three windows XP computers with the regular user account (userbmc, userbmd, or useridb) and the regular password. Icons should be on the desktop which will take you to the /data or /sump directories for the station in which you have collected your data:

Back up to DVD's
Each of the three windows XP computers is equipped with a 4/8X speed Plextor DVD writer (PX-7084). A single DVD-R or DVD+R disc can hold ~4.5 GB of data and can be recorded in about 15 to 25 minutes (longer if optional test runs are included), depending on the media chosen (4X versus 8X).

For 8X and 4X DVD+R recording, the manufacturer recommends using Mitsubishi Chemical/Verbatim, Taiyo Yuden, Ricoh; for 4X DVD-R recording, the manufacturer recommends using Mitsubishi Chemical/Verbatim, Taiyo Yuden, Maxell, TDK.

The DVD recording program is activated by the icon with the title DVD Creator 6. Choose the “Creator Classic” option, then drag-and-drop data files from the correct /data or /sump directories, and finally burn them to DVD-R/+R discs by pushing the burn button located on the right-bottom of the menu.

Backup to Firewire/USB drives
Simply plug your Firewire/USB drive into one of the Windows computers. An icon should appear after a few seconds which will indicate that your drive is mounted successfully. Drag-and-pull your data files from the correct data or sump directories to your Firewire/USB drive.

Please remember to unmount your drive before physically disconnecting it from the computer. The unmount function is usually accessed by opening up an icon located at the right side of the bottom menu bar. Otherwise there is a risk that your drive may become corrupted.

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Firewire

Firewire hard drives are becoming very popular with many research groups. They are easy to setup, relatively inexpensive to purchase, and provide a fast way to backup data. BioCARS provides a couple of different options to connect your firewire drive to our network.

The main problem in using firewire drives is that the format of the firewire hard disk is important. A drive formatted as NTFS (which is the windows standard) can not be seen by Linux and a drive formatted as ext2 or ext3 (the Linux standard) can not be seen by Windows. The only exception to this rule is with the FAT32 format. This format will work on either Linux or Windows computers and is recommended if you are not sure which operating system you will use. If you know that you will always use either Windows or Linux, but not both, then this is not an issue.

Using the BioCARS Windows computer
BioCARS has three computers running Windows XP which can be used with your firewire/usb drive. Log on to the appropriate machine with the standard login name and password and follow these directions.

Through your own laptop
If you have your laptop setup to use a firewire drive, then you only need to attach your laptop to our network.

Using the Linux Backup Computers
Firewire under Linux is not as seamless as it is under Windows but it is possible to attach your drive to one of our Linux backup computers.

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Laptop Backup

A Laptop (both PC and Mac) with an Ethernet card can be connected to our internal network through DHCP. DHCP automatically assigns an unused IP address to your machine and allows you copy your data to your laptop hard drive or an external disk connected to the laptop. Ethernet cables are available in the computer room and the stations which allow you to access our internal network. Please note that this wired network is quarantined from the rest of the world, and is used for accessing your data only. For connecting to a remote site, surfing the web or accessing e-mails, please use a wireless card to connect to the wireless network provided by APS.

Most research groups use anonymous ftp to obtain their data from one of three computers (bm14cxf.q.biocars.org, bm14dxf.q.biocars.org, or id14bxf.q.biocars.org depending on the beamline (bmc, bmd, or idb, respectively) that you collected your data on). A second option, if you are using Windows, is to select the "Run" option in the "Start" menu and type "\\bm14cxf.q.biocars.org" or whatever is appropriate for your beamline. You should be prompted for a username and password. The standard BioCARS usernames (userbmc, userbmd, and useridb) and passwords are needed. This should open a window from which you can find your data and copy it to your drive.

Automatic copying to the laptop!!
If your are using linux on the laptop and have the wget and bash programs available then you can use the following script to automatically copy the data from the BioCARS computers to your laptop. Copy the following information to an empty file and call it something like "data2laptop". You will need to change the computer name and directory information for your particular situation.

#!/bin/bash
while
   rm -f d2l.log
   do wget -nH -nv -m -a d2l.log --passive-ftp ftp://bm14dxf/henning_0204/
   sleep 30
done

Put the script in the directory on your laptop where you want to store the data and make it executable (chmod 777 data2laptop).

Run the script by typing "./data2laptop &".
This will run the program in the background and check for new files every 30 seconds. The wget command line options can be changed for your particular needs. The current setup will copy any new files that are on the host computer but not erase anything on your laptop. This script may take up a lot of cpu time on the laptop so you might want to make it more manageable by running it with the nice command
(nice -20 ./data2laptop &).

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Backing up data using a Macintosh

Some users have experienced problems when trying to connect Macintosh computers to the BioCARS internal network. To circumvent this problem, simply turn off DHCP and assign your computer a static IP address. Windows and Linux based computers do not appear to have this problem but this procedure should work for those systems as well.

  1. Disable DHCP
  2. Set your IP address to any listed under the appropriate beamline. If you are connecting more than one computer to our network make sure each machine has a different IP address.
    14-ID-B
    192.168.86.220
    192.168.86.221
    192.168.86.222
    192.168.86.223
    192.168.86.224     		14-BM-C
    192.168.86.240
    192.168.86.241
    192.168.86.242
    192.168.86.243
    192.168.86.244     		14-BM-D
    192.168.86.250
    192.168.86.251
    192.168.86.252
    192.168.86.253
    192.168.86.254
  3. Set DNS server to 192.168.86.1
  4. Set Default route or Gateway to 192.168.86.1
  5. Set Subnet mask to 255.255.255.0

Your data is located on one of three BioCARS servers depending on which beamline you are on.

14-ID-B id14bxf.q.biocars.org
14-BM-C bm14cxf.q.biocars.org
14-BM-D bm14dxf.q.biocars.org

Feel free to ask a staff member if you have any problems!

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