The department provides an archive server that gives users access to “snapshots” of users' home directory. This allows users to retrieve files that may have been altered or deleted without contacting the technical team.
Accessing the Archive
Access the archive of your home directory from any computer in EECS using an SFTP client. The name of the archive server is archive.eecs.yorku.ca. There are a variety of command line and GUI SFTP implementations available for all platforms. You may even already have one installed.
To access the archive of your home directory from a centrally-managed Linux system via the command line, use this command: (no username or password is required)
sftp archive
If you have used ftp before, the sftp command syntax is similar. Once connected, you can enter a “?” to see a list of available commands. Alternatively, see the sftp man page for more details.
You may also access the archive of your home directory from centrally-managed Linux systems via a GUI client, muCommander. To start it up, just type:
% mucommander
Once inside muCommander, go to the “Bookmarks” menu, and select “archive.eecs.yorku.ca” from the list. After entering your username and password, you will be connected to the archive of your home directory. The files from the archive will show up on the left side of your screen, and your EECS home directory will show up on the right side. You will be able to drag files from the archive directly into your home directory.
muCommander is written in Java, and can be run on a variety of platforms. Click here for the Java Webstart version..
Please note that the archive of your home directory is read only. Archive Structure
Inside your home directory archive, you will find two directories – “old” and “current”. “current” contains the most up to date archive data, while “old” contains older archive data. Inside each of these directories, you will find a number of directories that have numbers for names. All of these numbers are of the format: YYYYMMDD representing the date on which the archive was created. where YYYY is the year, MM is the month, and DD is the day of the month. For example, “20170222” corresponds to Feb. 22, 2017. Archives are updated every day early in the morning (typically before 9:00 am). Each of these directories will contain a version of your home directory as it was on the day the archive was created.
For your convenience a number of symbolic links are also maintained automatically in this area:
last - always points to the most recent archive week - points to the archive from 1 week ago month - points to the archive from 1 month ago