ARCHIVED: Restore files on Webserve

This content has been archived, and is no longer maintained by Indiana University. Information here may no longer be accurate, and links may no longer be available or reliable.

Note:

Due to the evolving coronavirus situation, the retirement of Webserve was delayed until April 16 to allow classes that reference sites on Webserve to continue with minimal disruption.

All remaining Webserve sites were disabled beginning April 16, along with login access to webserve.iu.edu. If you have websites that still need to be moved to IU Sitehosting, you should migrate immediately.

Webserve is supported by the Comodo data backup and recovery service. Data recovery options include overnight snapshots for the previous 14 days. Data may be recovered manually, or by contacting Support Center Tier 2 for assistance.

Manual recovery will require familiarity with SSH applications such as ARCHIVED: PuTTY or ARCHIVED: Cyberduck as well as many common Unix commands. For more about common Unix commands, see Introduction to Unix commands. Access to an FTP application, such as ARCHIVED: WinSCP, is also helpful.

To manually recover data, first establish an SSH connection to Webserve using your preferred SSH application. Once the connection has been established, change your directory to the following using a cd command:

  ip/<account>/.snapshot

Note that the .snapshot directory is hidden, even to commands such as ls -la, which normally show a list of hidden files. Once in the .snapshot directory, a directory listing command such as ls -la will show all the available snapshots. If you know approximately when the data was lost or corrupted, you may go to the snapshot directory from prior to that date and time and recover your data. Because restoring the entire site from snapshot is storage intensive, you should recover only those files and directories you need.

For simplicity, copy the files and subdirectories you want to recover from /.snapshot to:

  ip/<account>/recoveredfiles/

You may need to create this directory prior to copying files over from .snapshot. After you copy these files to .snapshot, you may move them from .snapshot to the directory you need to restore them to. You can continue to use the command-line interface or, alternately, any standard FTP application to move these files to the directories where needed.

Recovery by the administrator

If you are uncomfortable working with a Linux command-line interface, you may contact Support Center Tier 2 to request the deleted files or directories you need restored. Only the group account owner can request file restoration from Support Center Tier 2. The group account owner will need to provide the following information in the restoration request:

The names of the file(s) or directories being restored

The date the files should be restored from (within the past 14 days)

Support Center Tier 2 will follow up with you and escalate your request to the Webserve administrators. Administrators attempt to restore files within one business day from the request. They will place recovered files in a directory inside ip/<account>/ so you can manually restore the files to their proper location after reviewing them.