Archives to CD
To ensure that faculty files remain backed up, a new scheme to
write files to CDrom has been implemented. Every 60 days, the
entirety of every faculty member's home directory (that on /fac/users
only)will be written to CDRom, and that CDRom presented to the
user (that is, you keep the CD's). Home directories will be written
to these CD's as a gzipped tar file (tar.gz, or .tgz) in ISO9660
format. These CD's should be readable by pretty much any computer
with a CDRom drive, and tar and gunzip programs are available for
every major machine architecture (even MacOS9! :-)
Users may choose to NOT have their files archived in this manner by
sending mail to help@cs.
This mechanism was created because we thought there might be cases of
files going missing unnoticed for long periods of time; in this way a
user could be sure the files were saved, and even 'restore' files
themselves if they wished.
Note that these backups-to-CD are only done on /fac/users
home directories, not, for instance, on /res/users files.