Account backupsCopy Anchor Link

CSE takes daily account backups of all student and staff home directories.

Files from these backups can be retrieved "self-serve".

CSE is in the process of updating its backup systems

New backup systemCopy Anchor Link

Backups are located in a hidden .snapshot directory within your home directory

This ~/.snapshot directory will not appear in a directory listing but is accessible with cd

Within ~/.snapshot you will find timestamped directories for each snapshot. eg. accounts_daily_2026-11-11

Within ~/.snapshot you will find:

• hourly snapshots for the last 24 hours
• daily snapshots for the last 7 days
• weekly snapshots for the last 4 weeks

Within each snapshot you will find a full copy of your home directory as it was at the time of the backup. You can copy files from the backup location into your home directory to restore them

# replace "path/to/a/file.txt" with the actual file path for the file you with to restore
$ cp -a /home/z5123456/.snapshot/accounts_daily_2026-11-11/path/to/a/file.txt /home/z5123456/path/to/a/file.txt

Old backup systemCopy Anchor Link

If the ~/.snapshot directory doesn't exist your account is still using the old system

You can access your backups at /import/nw-syd-backup1/1/backups/users/<last-two-chars-of-username>/<username>/ eg. /import/nw-syd-backup1/1/backups/users/56/z5123456/

within you will find daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly backups:

• /import/nw-syd-backup1/1/backups/users/56/z5123456/daily.0 is 0 days ago (~2am today)
• /import/nw-syd-backup1/1/backups/users/56/z5123456/daily.1 is 1 day ago (~2am yesterday)
• etc
• /import/nw-syd-backup1/1/backups/users/56/z5123456/weekly.0 is 0 weeks ago (~2am on the most recent Sunday)
• /import/nw-syd-backup1/1/backups/users/56/z5123456/weekly.1 is 1 weeks ago (~2am last Sunday)
• etc

within the daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly directories you will find a full copy of your home directory as it was at the time of the backup You can copy files from the backup location into your home directory to restore them

# replace "path/to/a/file.txt" with the actual file path for the file you with to restore
$ cp -a /import/nw-syd-backup1/1/backups/users/56/z5123456/daily.3/path/to/a/file.txt /home/z5123456/path/to/a/file.txt

Additional StorageCopy Anchor Link

Some users have access to additional storage: eg. HPC scratch storage, and DataBase courses localstorage.

These storage locations are not backed up any files deleted are permanently lost.

Self Admin ServersCopy Anchor Link

Researchers with Self Admin Servers are responsible for their own backups.