At IU, are data stored on the SDA backed up?
Due to the mammoth volume of data stored on the Scholarly Data Archive (SDA) at Indiana University, back-ups are neither practical nor economical. The SDA doesn't have an offline, traditional backup system, so any deletion you perform will cause an irreversible loss of data.
However, to protect against random tape errors, two tape copies of the data are created by default. If one tape fails, data can be retrieved from the other tape. The two copies of data reside at two geographically distant sites (at IU Bloomington and at IUPUI) in two separate tape libraries. Also, two separate metadata backups are performed, at IUB and IUPUI. As a result, even in the event of a catastrophic disaster affecting either the IUB or IUPUI site (such as a fire or a tornado), all dual-copy data on the SDA would still be safe.
Last modified on September 26, 2012.







