TSM Usage and Charging Policy

The primary goal of the TSM backup service is to protect users' personal work from loss due to hardware failure or inadvertent deletion. To focus the service more directly on that goal, and assure that TSM resources will be adequately matched to demand, some changes have been made in the policies and charges associated with TSM backup. The new policies went into effect on June 1, 2004 for undergraduate students, and July 1, 2004 for all other users.

Backing Up Only Personal Data

Personal work documents stored on faculty, staff and graduate student workstations will be backed up at no charge and with no limit on size. The definition of personal documents will be based on the location of the documents, for example the "My Documents" and "\usr" folders on a Windows NT or Windows 2000 systems. See the appendix of this document for a complete description of what will be backed up on each operating system.

Undergraduate students will be provided with 250 MB of shared network disk storage where their data will be protected by two different backup/restore capabilities. Self-service recovery of individual files that have been deleted or damaged will be provided by the shared storage server using a "snapshot" technology, which maintains copies of changed or deleted files in a special storage area on disk. TSM backup will be used to guard against catastrophic failure of the entire shared storage system. For more information on OIT's network disk storage service, see the Knowledge Base article at http://www.princeton.edu/files.

As of June 1, 2004 undergraduate students will no longer be able to create new TSM backup accounts. Existing undergraduate accounts will be maintained after that date but they will be limited in the amount of data that they can back up. The class of 2007 is the last class to be offered TSM accounts.

Complete Backup

For those systems that need backup service beyond the personal documents directories, a complete backup option is available for a fee of $5.00 per month. This complete backup service encompasses all directories on all disk volumes, with the exception of a few such as Temporary Internet Files and other similarly temporary directories. An $5.00 fee will apply for any system whose total TSM occupancy is less than 150GB. Since data is compressed before it is stored on TSM's tapes, the 150 GB limit represents a much larger occupancy on a user's disks. Usage above the 150 GB limit will be charged at $.50/GB month in addition to the $5.00 charge for complete backup. Computers participating in DeSC (the Desktop Systems Council), because of their special standardized software, will continue to receive their regular backups at no charge.

Some departments store their users' personal work on a central server, and therefore do not backup individual workstations. To accommodate this situation, OIT has defined a mechanism for pooling a nominal backup entitlement across a set of unbacked up workstations and a central server. The department will identify a set of user workstations and the server being used to store the data from those workstations. A credit of 5 GB for each unbacked up workstation will be subtracted from the total occupancy of the server, and the standard charge will be calculated on the remaining usage.

Selecting a Backup Option

To choose either the "Personal" or "Complete" option, the TSM contact for a system can go to the http://tsm.princeton.edu/ web site, choose "Maintain your TSM account" and select a service level. A project-grant number is required in order to choose the Complete option. If no option has been selected by July 1, 2004 OIT will make every effort to contact the owner of the system, and if we are unable to make contact, the system will automatically be placed in the "Personal" category. A department administrator who wants to specify backup service levels for a large group of machines can send a list of system names and options to tsm@princeton.edu.

Appendix: Definitions for Personal Data Directories

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