Home Storage (/home)

The /home file system provides each user with 100 GB of storage. It is available across all HPC systems (web interface, login nodes, and compute nodes) and is intended for long-term storage of important files.

These file are backed up daily, and recovery of all the files in your $HOME directory can be recovered in their original form for up to 28 days.

Seeing All Snapshots

Snapshots of your $HOME are accessible under a hidden directory .snapshot.

Example (as of September 11):

[rcsparky@login01:~]$ cd ~/.snapshot
[rcsparky@login01:~/.snapshot]$ ls -1
ScheduleName_duration_2025-08-15_12:00/
ScheduleName_duration_2025-08-16_12:00/
ScheduleName_duration_2025-08-17_12:00/
ScheduleName_duration_2025-08-18_12:00/
ScheduleName_duration_2025-08-19_12:00/
....
ScheduleName_duration_2025-09-09_12:00/
ScheduleName_duration_2025-09-10_12:00/
ScheduleName_duration_2025-09-11_12:00/

This is a directory snapshot of precisely the contents of your $HOME directory as of the listed date and time. Files that were modified or even deleted exist here, intact, until they are rotated out after 28 days.

Seeing All Files in a Snapshot

If you want to recover a file that existed in $HOME on September 1st at 12:00, you can view it like this:

[rcsparky@login01:~/.snapshot]$ cd ScheduleName_duration_2025-09-01_12\:00/
[rcsparky@login01:~/.snapshot/ScheduleName_duration_2025-09-01_12:00]$ ls -la
total 3254392
drwx------ 25 rcsparky grp_rcadmins       2391 Aug 22 15:22 ./
dr-xr-xr-x  2 root   root                  0 Sep 11 12:00 ../
-rw-------  1 rcsparky grp_rcadmins        322 May 13  2024 .ICEauthority
-rw-------  1 rcsparky grp_rcadmins       1233 Aug 22 15:22 .Xauthority
drwx------  3 rcsparky grp_rcadmins         23 Aug 29  2024 .apptainer/
-rw-------  1 rcsparky grp_rcadmins      66820 Aug 22 15:22 .bash_history
-rwxrwx---  1 rcsparky grp_rcadmins         18 Dec  6  2016 .bash_logout*
-rwxrwx---  1 rcsparky grp_rcadmins        203 Jan 29  2023 .bash_profile*
-rwxr-x---  1 rcsparky grp_rcadmins        770 Jul 28  2022 .bash_prompt*
-rwxrwx---  1 rcsparky grp_rcadmins      10444 Dec  2  2024 .bashrc*
drwxr-x---  9 rcsparky grp_rcadmins        182 Jul 22 11:15 .cache/
-rw-r-----  1 rcsparky grp_rcadmins      30145 Sep 26  2024 .catjot
...

info

File timestamps shown here indicate the last modification time, not the date of the snapshot. Everything in this directory, however, will match the contents at the time of the snapshot directory's name.

Recovering Files

Copy the file(s) you need (using either command line tools like above, or SFTP/SCP tools like Filezilla or Cyberduck) back into your regular $HOME.

$ cp -v .bashrc ~/.bashrc.recovered
'.bashrc' -> '/home/rcsparky/.bashrc.recovered'