AFS File System Services
CSAIL uses the AFS distributed file system, invented at
Carnegie Mellon, commercialized by Transarc (now IBM Pittsburgh labs), and maintained by the
OpenAFS project. The following pages describe various facets of CSAIL's AFS cell.
AFS Installation
NFS File System Services
In general, AFS is the recommended filesystem due to its added security and flexibility over NFS, but AFS does not provide high levels of performance in certain access patterns. TIG can provide high performance NFS service where it's needed. Please
contact TIG if you want to arrange to have access to a higher performance network filesystem in addition to the standard AFS storage space.
Backups
All TIG provided network storage is backed up by default, though exceptions can be made by request. Nightly backups are kept for one week and then merged into weekly sets which in turn are kept for one month and merged into monthly sets. Monthly tapes are kept indefinately though we only guarantee recovery for one year due to changing hardware and software environments (if you ask sweetly we can usually go back a bit further). Additionally AFS and the high-speed NFS have periodic snapshots that are kept online.
