Archiving Data

The backup and archive service is provided by the HRZ through the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM). In addition to our nightly backups, we provide the archiving service for individual users. Archiving means: The data is transfered to HRZ and stored on tape. In opposite to a backup, the local data can been deleted. The data in the archive are stored for ten years and then automatically deleted.

The archive client is installed on our login server.

Archiving Data

Open a ssh connection to our login server:

$ ssh th.physik.uni-frankfurt.de

The command line tool is called 'dsmc' (for historical reason it stand for 'Distributed Storage Manager Client'). It supports interactive operation (call without arguments) and non interactive with command line arguments.

To archive a single file (eg. a tar archive) just call:

$ dsmc archive FILENAME

To archive a complete tree call

$ dsmc archive -subdir=yes DIRECTORY/

All files are stored and queried with the complete path name.

If the files are successfully archived, they can be deleted from the local disk.

Querying archived data

To see the archives data from the current directory:

 dsmc query archive "*"

Use the option '-subdir=yes' to get a complete list of files.

Retrieving archived data

If you need the archived data back, enter

  dsmc retrieve FILESPEC

Deleting archived data

You have th permission to delete your own data, before the end of the archive period of ten years with the command:

 dsmc delete archive FILESPEC

Further Reading:

• HRZ Page (German) [1]
• IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Manual (english, pdf) [2]