Central Backup Service

The central backup service backs up local hard disks of servers and computers at the university’s institutions. This way, we prevent data losses which may occur if hard disks are defect or you accidentally delete files from your computer. The University of Mannheim operates this service in cooperation with the computing center at Heidelberg University and the IBM Spectrum Protect solution.

The transfer and storage of data in Heidelberg is encrypted. The encrypted data is secured with a self-assigned password.
Please note: The encryption password is essential for restoring the backup! Therefore, please keep the password in a safe place.

Request backup services

Before you can use the backup service, you need to submit a request for each computer you want to backup.
Note: For employees in the administration it is not necessary to apply for the backup service.

If you are using our Premium Support, please contact your personal IT expert.
If you are an academic staff member at a chair, please contact the responsible administrator for your chair.

If none of this is the case, please submit the request yourself. Please proceed as follows:

1. Send an e-mail to backupmail-uni-mannheim.de and include the following information:

Name and IP address of the computer(s) you want to backup
Operating system and version of the operating system installed on the computer(s) you want to backup
Name, e-mail address and phone number of the responsible contact person

2. You will receive an e-mail from us after a few days with further details.

Please note:

If servers or multi-user systems are affected, the chair holder must confirm in writing (signature) that the person responsible for the backup has unrestricted administrator’s rights to the relevant computers.
If the working environment is only used by you, it is sufficient if you are registered as contact person for the relevant IP address in the IP database of the University IT. Usually, we register contact persons when a computer is connected to the university network for the first time or when the IP address changes. For the operation of the backup service, it is necessary that we are informed about any changes in responsibility for the computer in question.

Please note that we cannot offer a backup service for computers which are not up-to-date and are not registered correctly in the database.
Making sure that the backup service functions properly on the individual computer is only possible by checking the protocol files on the computer. The local administrator and/or owner of the computer is responsible for regularly checking the protocol files of the backup.
In order to inform you about any problems and malfunctions, we need a contact person at your office. We must be able to contact the person at the e-mail address you provided and the person must be able to answer requests at short notice. Therefore, it is particularly important that you inform us in due time if there is a change in administrators. The owner of the computer is responsible for making sure that the contact person’s data stored in the backup service are up-to-date.
We reserve the right to remove systems from the backup service without prior consultation, if the systems are inactive for a longer period of time.