Restore files on Sitehost or Pages

• Overview
• Manual data recovery
• Recovery by the administrator

Overview

Data backup and recovery are available for Sitehost and Pages. Data recovery options include nightly snapshots for the previous 14 days. Data may be recovered manually, or by contacting Tier 2 Support for assistance.

Manual recovery will require familiarity with SSH and common Unix commands. Access to a graphical SFTP application is also helpful; see SFTP clients recommended for use at IU.

Manual data recovery

To manually recover data, first establish an SSH connection to Sitehost or Pages using your preferred SSH application. Once the connection has been established, change your directory to using a cd command, as follows.

/groups/<account>/.snap

/users/<account>/.snap

Note that the .snap directory is hidden, even to commands such as ls -la, which normally show a list of hidden files. Once in the .snap 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 /.snap to one of the following.

For Sitehost:

/groups/<account>/recoveredfiles

For Pages:

/users/<account>/recoveredfiles

You may need to create this directory prior to copying files over from .snap. After you copy these files to recoveredfiles, you may move them from there to the directory you need to restore them to. You can use the command-line interface or a graphical SFTP application to move these files to the directories where needed.

Recovery by the administrator

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

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

Staff will follow up with you and escalate your request to the Sitehost administrators. Administrators attempt to restore files within one business day from the request. They will place recovered files in a directory inside /groups/<account> (for Sitehost) or /users/<account> (for Pages) so you can manually restore the files to their proper location after reviewing them.