About Snapshots
The snapshot system on Indigo is designed to help prevent data loss by periodically recording the state of files/directories. This feature is only enabled on certain filesystems.
If you need to recover an accidentally deleted or modified file, there is no need to wait for an administrator! Users can access the snapshots themselves at any time.
What is a snapshot directory?
A snapshot directory contains files and directories as they existed at a particular point in time.
The name of the directory cleverly encodes the date and time when the snapshot
was captured and how many snapshots there are. For example,
8DaySnap_2024-09-03_22_00_00_UTC implies that we have eight days of
snapshots, and this particular snapshot was taken on September 3rd, 2024 at
22:00 UTC.
You can find the snapshots within the .snapshot directory, which can be
accessed from any directory in your space where snapshots are enabled. Use the
command cd .snapshot to access them.
.snapshot is a special directory and will not appear in the directory
listing, even when hidden files are shown (or using ls -a).
How are snapshots configured?
Only certain file systems have snapshots enabled. See the table below to learn about the configuration of the snapshot system for each space.
| Space | Has Snapshots? | Frequency | Time | # of Snapshots |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Home | ✅ Yes | daily | 16:00 UTC / 11:00 EST | last 14 days |
| Project | ✅ Yes | daily | 19:00 UTC / 14:00 EST | last 8 days |
| Scratch | ❌ No | n/a | n/a | n/a |
Note that the snapshot times are listed in the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) time zone.
The number of snapshots for home is subject to change. Please check here for the most current information.
How to recover data from snapshots?
Users can browse to the snapshot directories to search for recoverable files. If you find the file you are looking for, recovery is simply a matter of copying the file outside the snapshot directory to save it.
For a file to be recoverable from snapshots, the file must have existed at the time the snapshot was captured. Newly created files will not be recoverable until the next snapshot is captured.
Please see the Data Recovery Assistant tool for a detailed walkthrough on how to recover data from snapshots.