Spectrum Scale provides an online backup that allows easy recovery from common problems such as accidental deletion of a file or the need to compare older versions of the same file.
Snapshots of the Spectrum Scale file systems (/home) are taken every day, and retained for the last seven days. Older snapshots are deleted automatically. Snapshots of a file system are read-only; changes can only be made to the active non-snapshot files and directories.
Snapshot directories are not visible to the ls command or readdir() function.
For example, the command
ls -a /home/<user>
does not list the hidden read-only folder .snapshots, but both
ls /home/<user>/.snapshots and
cd /home/<user>/.snapshots
do.
Recovering a file or a directory from Spectrum Scale snapshots is straightforward. For instance, type
cd /home/<user>/.snapshots
and choose the most convenient snapshot among the available dates, then copy the old file to the original directory.