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Storage and Backup - Description for Data Management Plans

Data stored in Sunet Drive resides either in an S3-bucket dedicated to the project or an S3-bucket assigned to the user. Data stored in folders outside of an S3 bucket are not covered by the following description. S3-buckets in Sunet Drive can help with the life-cycle management of the data from working material to data retention and finally the archival of data. Sunet Drive implements a solution that, during the runtime of the project, provides backup, disaster recovery, and ransomware protection. S3 buckets are mirrored from the primary storage site to a secondary storage location:

  • Full backups are taken monthly and differential backups are taken during the night
  • The minimum retention time for a full backup is one month in addition to the number of differential nightly backups since the last full backup
  • The following Sunet Drive nodes have an extended data retention time, any customer can request extended data retention time to any number of months:
  • 6 months: Stockholm University (SU), Mälardalen University (MDU), Sunet, SciLifeLab
  • 3 months: Karlstad University (KAU)

The backup solution implemented by Sunet Drive is based on duplicity and rclone. This backup is implemented in addition to the built-in version-control of Sunet Drive, and therefore adds an additional layer of data protection. Infrastructure as code ensures stateless operation of all services, and combined with the described backup solution, the maximum potential data loss is aimed to be less than 24 hours.

The cost of backups is the same as for live data, that means that you only pay for the storage space of the backups (i.e. the storage of backups is counted against your storage space). Since the size of backups are dependent on how much the data change, storage space for backups will depend on the nature of the data, as well as on the retention time of the backups.