as part of https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T201165 the Analytics team thought to reach out to everybody to make it clear that all the home directories on the stat/notebook nodes are not backed up periodically. They run on a software RAID configuration spanning multiple disks of course, so we are resilient on a disk failure, but even if unlikely if might happen that a host could loose all its data. Please keep this in mind when working on important projects and/or handling important data that you care about.

I just added a warning to https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/Data_access#Analytics_clients. If you have really important data that is too big to backup, keep in mind that you can use your home directory (/user/your-username) on HDFS (that replicates data three times across multiple nodes).

Please let us know if you have comments/suggestions/etc.. in the aforementioned task.

Thanks in advance!

Luca (on behalf of the Analytics team)