Data storage and back-up

Temporary Storage During Computation

Each of SAPAC's compute facilities has some temporary storage available, in the form of local hard disks, whilst jobs are running. Please see the Hardware section of this User Guide to determine how much temporary space is available.

Long Term Storage

SAPAC currently maintains and manages 22 TB of storage.

There is 3 TB in total of shared storage available for all users of SAPAC's facilities. This leaves a relatively modest amount of disk space available for each user. Consequently, users' home directories, /home/users, should be used ONLY for storing small data files, executables, job submission scripts, etc. Larger data files should be stored in the shared data area, /data/users.

Note:

• Files in the data directories WILL NOT be backed up. You must make your own arrangements for backing up this data. You can use sftp to transfer data to your own computer and back it up yourself. We can assist by providing facilities for backup onto removable disks.

• You may be asked to clean up your data area periodically, especially if you start to store large amounts of data there. This is to ensure everybody gets a fair allocation of a limited resource.

In addition, some research groups, having need for greater capacity, have funded their own dedicated storage, which is managed by SAPAC on their behalf.

Individual researchers, or research groups can arrange similar access to further storage capacity as their needs increase.