NetApp Filer Snapshots


CSE disk storage space is implemented on a NetApp Filer FAS2050A network-attached storage (NAS) device named vulcan. Netapp Filers provide an innovative feature called 'snapshots'. Snapshots are point-in-time copies of data files. We've configured vulcan to snapshot your data once per hour.

We maintain Linux system home directory data snapshots for the most recent 48 hours. When data snapshots reach the maximum number of hours that they will be kept, the system overwrites them in 'round-robin' fashion and they are lost from the snapshot system.

Snapshots are available immediately, so file restorations are fast. The TSM backup robot, on the other hand, can take up to an hour to restore your files.


Your data snapshots are located here:



  • n is the nth hour back from the current hour, where n is an integer in range [0 .. 47].
  • group is your UNIX group (e.g. csefaculty, csgrad, csdue, unmdue).
  • userid is your userid.


  1. If you are a CSE Windows Active Directory (AD) user, your Windows data snapshots are located here:
  2. It pays to verify that your data files exist within this directory sometime before you lose data to make sure your CSE AD account is configured correctly. Then you will be confident that your backups will be available in the event that "bad things happen" sometime in the future. :-)