SLAC provides a mechanism for moving large files to their tape storage system. This is suitable for manual backup or archiving of important data. File sizes between 100MB to 10GB are suitable for storage with the mstore command. For 10 GB to 100 GB, use the astore command. The general idea is to use tar to package up a directory and then move that into the appropriate mstore/astore area. The SLAC HPSS system then automates the process of getting the file onto tape. Complete documentation of this is available at The mstore Command Reference on the SLAC computing website.

Here is the sequence of steps to get your data into mstore/astore:

1. get yourself into the kibckup unix group (talk to Stuart)
2. log into an astore capable host. (noric, ...)
3. cd /nfs/astore/g/kibckup
4. astore create yourfilename (typically xxx.tar.gz)
5. cd parent_dir (parent directory of the one you want to back up)
6. tar czf /nfs/astore/g/kibckup/xxx.tar.gz xxx
7. cd /nfs/astore/g/kibckup
8. astore ls -F (shows status of files)
9. astore put -p xxx.tar.gz (optional, immediate push to tape followed by purge from disk)

You can save time by omitting the compression - the data is compressed en route to the tape drive anyway, so its probably better to make an uncompressed tar file in the kibckup directory.

Note that astore and mstore are basically the same command - the commands in the the online mstore documentation work for astore as well.

Here is the sequence of steps to get your data out of mstore/astore:

1. log into an astore capable host. (noric, ...)
2. cd /nfs/astore/g/kibckup
3. astore get xxx.tar.gz
4. cd parent_dir (new parent directory you want to contain the one you backed up)
5. tar xzf /nfs/astore/g/kibckup/xxx.tar.gz