• Each day, Savannah data is rsync'd by the FSF (watch out for load).
• Each week, those data are put on tape (full backup, not incremental).
• We keep the first set of each month indefinitely. The others are kept for up to 2 months, and then recycled.

It's straightforward to restore files from the daily rsync.

However, it takes quite a lot of time to restore files from tapes: if you want to restore a single file that happens to be on tape 3 or 4 (each tape holds 100GB without compression), sysadmins need to spool through all the tapes until it is found. This takes the better part of a day.

A few locations are excluded from the backup (namely our huge /root/Trash as well as other system and/or temporary directories). If you introduce a new location that ought to be excluded from backups, notify sysadmin@gnu.org.

Around Dec 18, 2010, Sylvain created a backup/dl.sh script whose task is to download all the scripts and config files from the live Savannah that cannot be included directly in the documentation because they are too big, or change too often. The good surprise is that there aren't many such files. With a copy of the repository, and a run of dl.sh, one should be able to rebuild Savannah from scratch.