At IU, who can recover files and email accidentally deleted from UITS central systems?

UITS can recover backups of files deleted from Oncourse CL Resources, Cyrus mail, and other central systems at Indiana University. For Exchange mailboxes, see the second Note below. If you need to request a file recovery, you may do so in person at one of the UITS Support Center walk-in locations. Alternatively, if you want to charge the file recovery fees to a departmental account, you can make the request via email to  ithelp@iu.edu  or by calling your campus Support Center.

For information about Support Center walk-in offices (hours and locations), see UITS Support Center walk-in locations and services.

File recovery costs $20. This includes attempted recovery of one or more files. For multiple files, multiple tapes may have been used to perform the backup; however, you will not pay separately for each tape, but pay a lump sum of $20 for all of the files, regardless of where they reside. You must pay the fee before UITS will attempt the recovery. The fee is assessed regardless of whether or not the recovery is successful.

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

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. Similarly, email messages that you deleted on the day they arrived are impossible to recover.

On most systems, files cannot be recovered more than 30 days after their deletion, because backup tapes are kept for only one month. On Cyrus mail, files cannot be recovered more than 15 days after they were deleted.

Note: In Outlook, you can recover items from your Exchange mailbox for up to 15 days. Consequently, UITS does not offer file recovery from tape backup for individual Exchange mailboxes. The Exchange administrators maintain daily tape backups only for systemwide disaster recovery. For more information, see At IU, how can I recover deleted items in Outlook if I am an Exchange user?

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