At IU, how do I recover files or email deleted from UITS central systems?

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UITS maintains limited backups for email messages and files deleted from many central systems at Indiana University. The preferred method for requesting a file recovery is to do so in person at the UITS Support Center help desk located in the Information Commons on the IU Bloomington campus. If you are charging the file recovery fees to a departmental account, you can request the file recovery from the Support Center via email, chat, or phone. If you are not on the Bloomington campus, contact the Support Center for additional options.

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Cyrus

You can recover items from Cyrus mail (Webmail) up to 15 days after they are deleted. Unlike other central systems, files do not need to reside on the system overnight in order to be recovered. When you request a Cyrus email recovery, UITS can temporarily grant you access to the Undeletor tool for a $20 fee. This fee will not be reimbursed if recovery is unsuccessful. For more, see How do I use the Cyrus (Webmail) Undeletor tool?

Exchange

UITS does not offer file recovery from the server for individual IU Exchange mailboxes. However, you can recover items from your IU Exchange mailbox up to 15 days after they are deleted. See In Outlook for Windows, how can I recover deleted items if I am an IU Exchange user?

Warning: When mail is deleted from Mac OS X Mail, the messages go to the Trash folder as usual. However, messages deleted from this folder do not go to the Exchange retention area, and they are not recoverable. Additionally, mail that is hard-deleted via Option-Delete skips the Trash folder and also does not go into the retention area.

Other central systems

For other central systems, UITS can recover files only if they resided on the system overnight. Incremental file backups are performed nightly on all UITS shared systems. If you create and delete a file on the same day, it will not be recoverable because it was deleted before the daily incremental file backup was performed.

On most systems, files cannot be recovered more than 30 days after their deletion, because backup tapes are kept for only one month. File recovery costs $20, and includes attempted recovery of one or more files. The fee must be paid before UITS will attempt the recovery, and fees will not be reimbursed if recovery is unsuccessful.

Note: It will take approximately two working days to retrieve your files from a central system.

Webserve

File recovery on Webserve follows the standards for other central systems. However, UITS does not back up directories in Webserve accounts that are named tmp or cache , including their subdirectories. In addition, temporary session files with the prefix sess_ , which are often created by PHP applications, are also excluded from system backups, regardless of their location. Excluding these files from system backups conserves resources, reduces errors, and improves efficiency.

Note: This change will not impact your files or your use of sessions on Webserve; it simply means that UITS will be unable to perform file restores on these items. If you have important content in these directories, either rename the directories or perform regular backups of these directories yourself.

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Last modified on May 20, 2013.