Data Management

Our clusters have local parallel filesystems and may also have the ARC Cluster File System (ACFS) available.

Checking quotas

The amount of storage you can use on the cluster is limited by a quota.

Local filesystem quota

Check your quota and usage for home and Scratch with the lquota command.

ACFS quotas

Check your ACFS quota and usage with the aquota command.

The ACFS has dual locations for resilience, and as a result commands like du -h or ls -alsh will report filesizes on it as being twice what they really are. The aquota command will show you real usage and quota.

Giving files to another user

If both users are active and on the same cluster, you can give files to them. Walkthrough: Giving Files to Another User

Transferring data ownership

Requesting transfer of your data to another user

If you want to transfer ownership of all your data on a service to another user, with their consent, you can contact us at rc-support@ucl.ac.uk and ask us to do this. Please arrange this while you still have access to the institutional credentials associated with the account. Without this, we cannot identify you as the owner of the account.

You will need to tell us what data to transfer, on what cluster, and the username of the recipient.

Requesting data belonging to a user who has left

If a researcher you were working with has left and has not transferred their data to you before leaving there is a general UCL Data Protection process to gain access to that data.

At UCL Information Security Policy go to Monitoring Forms and take a copy of Form MO2 "Form MO2 - Request for Access to Stored Documents and Email - long-term absence or staff have left". (Note, it is also applicable to students).

Follow the guidance on that page for how to encrypt the form when sending it to them. The form needs to be signed by the head of department/division and the UCL data protection officer (data-protection@ucl.ac.uk).