TL;DR we have a new backup solution mainly for laptops that frequently leave campus and are looking for testers.

Among the many things we had to learn during the Corona-induced home office stint, one particularly interesting one was: which of our services do work from outside the ETH network, and which do not. I'd like to believe we fared rather well in general, but one glaring counter-example is our BackupPC service for lab and laptop computers. It relies on the client machine having a .dhcp.phys.ethz.ch host name, which only works on wired campus connections. We understand this meant missing backups for those of you who had to take machines off-campus.

In order to be prepared for a second wave, we've partnered up with our colleagues of isginf to provide a lab/laptop backup system that works with whatever network connection you have available. It's based on the tried and tested Open Source restic backup solution that runs on Windows, Linux and macOS clients.

At the current stage we're looking for early beta testers. Since lab computers are typically still in the lab and continue to work fine with BackupPC, laptop users are currently most interesting for us. So if you'd like to test out our road-warrior compatible backup solution, please get in touch. Be aware that this service still has some rough edges, but we'll walk you through all necessary steps and the backup runs themselves have been working fine for weeks now.

We just replaced our ailing backup server for laptops and lab PCs inplace with new, more performant hardware using the same proven BackupPC software, just a newer version. Its web-interface is available under the same URL.

The new server will start making backups from scratch for every host. Backups on the old server will still be available for a while at the address https://backuppc-old.phys.ethz.ch/.

Our old backup server became a victim of its own success. In the end it handled backups for over 100 hosts every day (over 160 during its whole life-time) and stored about 10 Terabytes of backups.

The BackupPC server of the Institute for Astronomy is not affected.

Due to a critical condition on our systems we were forced to shut down our backup servers. This means there will be

No backup during this weekend.

Please be aware of this temporary limitation when producing large or important amounts of data. We apologize.

Since Netbackup can't handle backups of PCs with intermittent network access (e.g. laptops or seldomly used lab PCs) nor MacOS X 10.5 or Windows Vista, there is a rising demand for backup of computers. For D-PHYS-owned laptops, laptops holding a relevant amount of ETH D-PHYS data, and for D-PHYS lab PCs, we now offer a backup service specifically targeted at computers with intermittent network access. It uses the free backup system BackupPC which does not need a local backup client to be installed on the computers to be backed up.

We ran the service in beta test for a couple of months and gathered a lot of experience with BackupPC. So we can now offer easy and regular backups of computers running any flavour of Linux and MacOS X, and---with the addition of locally installed 3rd party software (Cygwin)---also for Windows XP. Windows Vista as well as Windows XP without 3rd party software will follow. Read more about this service in our documentation wiki.