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Manual Browsing

You may also search through the snapshots by hand on the Gautschi filesystem if you are not sure what date you lost the file or would like to browse by hand. Snapshots for /home and /depot (/scratch does NOT have snapshots) can be browsed from any RCAC resource with the following methods.

If you do not have access to a compute cluster, any Gautschi user may use an SSH client to connect to gautschi.rcac.purdue.edu and browse from there. The snapshots are located at /home/.zfs/snapshot on these resources.

Once connected to the snapshot directory through SSH, you will see something similar to this:

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$ cd /home/.zfs/snapshot
$ ls -l
total 7072
drwxr-xr-x 2499 root root 2500 Jun  1 18:20 zfs-auto-snap_daily-2026-06-02-0000
drwxr-xr-x 2500 root root 2501 Jun  2 18:20 zfs-auto-snap_daily-2026-06-03-0000
drwxr-xr-x 2501 root root 2502 Jun  3 15:40 zfs-auto-snap_daily-2026-06-04-0000
drwxr-xr-x 2503 root root 2504 Jun  4 16:40 zfs-auto-snap_daily-2026-06-05-0000
drwxr-xr-x 2505 root root 2506 Jun  5 11:00 zfs-auto-snap_daily-2026-06-06-0000
drwxr-xr-x 2505 root root 2506 Jun  5 11:00 zfs-auto-snap_daily-2026-06-07-0000
drwxr-xr-x 2505 root root 2506 Jun  5 11:00 zfs-auto-snap_daily-2026-06-08-0000
drwxr-xr-x 2107 root root 2108 Mar 31 21:40 zfs-auto-snap_monthly-2026-04-01-0010
drwxr-xr-x 2424 root root 2425 Apr 30 09:20 zfs-auto-snap_monthly-2026-05-01-0010
drwxr-xr-x 2454 root root 2455 May 15 09:00 zfs-auto-snap_weekly-2026-05-18-0005
drwxr-xr-x 2468 root root 2469 May 23 20:40 zfs-auto-snap_weekly-2026-05-25-0005
drwxr-xr-x 2496 root root 2497 May 28 15:20 zfs-auto-snap_weekly-2026-06-01-0005
drwxr-xr-x 2505 root root 2506 Jun  5 11:00 zfs-auto-snap_weekly-2026-06-08-0005

Each of these directories is a snapshot of the entire Gautschi /home at the timestamp encoded into the directory name. The format for this timestamp is year, two digits for month, two digits for day, followed by the time of the day.

You may cd into any of these directories where you will find the entire Gautschi filesystem. Use cd to continue into your home directory on Gautschi and then you may browse the snapshot as normal.

Once you find the file you are looking for, use cp to copy the file back into your live Gautschi home directory. Do not attempt to modify files directly in the snapshot directories.

If you do not have access to a compute cluster, any Gautschi user may use an SSH client to connect to data.rcac.purdue.edu and browse from there. The snapshots are located at /depot/.snapshots on these resources.

You can also mount the snapshot directory over Samba (or SMB, CIFS) on Windows or Mac OS X. Mount (or map) the snapshot directory in the same way as you did for your main Gautschi space substituting the server name and path for \\datadepot.rcac.purdue.edu\depot\.winsnaps (Windows) or smb://datadepot.rcac.purdue.edu/depot/.winsnaps (Mac OS X).

Once connected to the snapshot directory through SSH or Samba, you will see something similar to this:

Snapshots folders may look slightly differently when accessed via SSH on gautschi.rcac.purdue.edu or via Samba on datadepot.rcac.purdue.edu. Here are examples of both.

SSH to gautschi.rcac.purdue.edu Samba mount on datadepot.rcac.purdue.edu 

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$ cd /depot/.snapshots
$ ls -1
daily_20190129000501
daily_20190130000501
daily_20190131000502
daily_20190201000501
daily_20190202000501
daily_20190203000501
daily_20190204000501
monthly_20181101001501
monthly_20181201001501
monthly_20190101001501
monthly_20190201001501
weekly_20190113002501
weekly_20190120002501
weekly_20190127002501
weekly_20190203002501

Gautschi snapshots via Samba

Each of these directories is a snapshot of the entire Gautschi filesystem at the timestamp encoded into the directory name. The format for this timestamp is year, two digits for month, two digits for day, followed by the time of the day.

You may cd into any of these directories where you will find the entire Gautschi filesystem. Use cd to continue into your lab's Gautschi space and then you may browse the snapshot as normal.

If you are browsing these directories over a Samba network drive you can simply drag and drop the files over into your live Data Depot folder.

Once you find the file you are looking for, use cp to copy the file back into your lab's live Gautschi space. Do not attempt to modify files directly in the snapshot directories.

Back to the Recovery section