Your home directory on the Unix cluster has a usage quota, to avoid too much space being taken by individual users. The standard quota is normally somewhere around 10GB. You can see your current usage and quota by visiting MyPhys.

If you run into your quota, and after reviewing your file usage find that you still need more space, you can reply to the warning email to request a change from us. Please understand, however, that the amount of space available is limited. Your home directory is not intended for large research data sets, for which separate project-specific storage should be used.

Your physics email is stored on a separate system, and is not part of the home directory quota.

The home directories are backed up nightly. You can retrieve recently-deleted files from backup yourself.

Other file systems are provided for research or project-specific data, under the /data hierarchy. This storage space is purchased by the research group. It can take the form of simple single drives in linux workstations, part of the shared research RAID pool, or dedicated RAID systems for large-scale storage needs.

These file systems are usually named either after the research group group, or with the name of the computer which hosts it, and contain further directories organized by user or by project. These areas should be used for large data sets and storage for local processes. Note that these areas are provided by the automounter - they are not activated until they are first accessed, so they won't necessarily appear in the output of commands like df.

Warning these areas are generally not backed up, other than by special request. If you have a large amount of data which requires backup, you should talk to us about the available options.

You can find shared temporary filesystems under /scratch, which may be used for scratch space for local processes. Don't place any files you may want to keep long-term here - files which have not been accessed for 30 days or more may be purged from this area, or when a workstation is updated.

Your scratch directory on the local system is always named /scratch/local/username, and can be accessed using the environment variable SCRATCHDIR. You can access non-local scratch directories using the path /scratch/hostname/username.

If running jobs under Condor, the environment variable CONDOR_SCRATCH_DIR gives the name of a directory where the job may place temporary data files.

Please don't use /tmp for creating temporary files, if you can help it. This area is very limited in size, and filling it may cause problems for the system.

We define an environment variable TMPDIR, which points to a suitable (and larger) area for temporary files. Also consider whether SCRATCHDIR (described above) might be more suitable…

New with scientific linux 5.x you can mount any filesystem you have ssh access to as a filesystem using fuse (the userspace filesystem driver). You can use this to access files from other systems outside of Tate Lab.

mkdir ~/mnt  #create a place to put it, can be called anything you want.
sshfs username@remotesystem:/path/to/mount ~/mnt

later, to unmount it:

fusermount -u ~/mnt