The disk which stores Unix home directories and Geosciences email died
late Thursday afternoon. The hardware was replaced and data was restored
from backup. As of 9 AM Sunday, the restore process is finished and all
data from the backup should be available.
There are several important points regarding the restored data:
1) The last backup was run Wednesday evening around 9 PM. Files created
after this have been lost. Modifications made after this are also lost.
2) Some of you may be missing email from your inbox dated before July 3.
This is because of the way we restored data. We have a backup of your
email from Wednesday, but the data needs to merged manually. Please
contact us if this affects you.
3) Email delivered during the outage will fit into a number of cases:
I. Email delivered between Wed 9 PM and Thu 7 PM is lost.
II. Email delivered after Thu 7 PM is either:
a. delivered to your account
b. bounced to the sender
c. queued on a remote server awaiting delivery. Queued mail may
take several hours to several days to be delivered.
I've taken several additional precautions to prevent this from happening
again. Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause you.
While all data should be restored, please feel free to contact us if you
notice any missing data or experience any other difficulty with the
systems.
Tom
support@geosc.psu.edu
3-7437, 5-5530
