¶ Storage Types and Services
We provide two types of storage: Fast and Archive.
- Fast storage - should be used for files that are currently in use for your computational work.
- Archive storage - for storing data that is not accessed very often, such as old research results. No computational work can be done on data stored in the archive.
On top of the Fast and Archive storage types, we provide three kinds of services: Snapshots, No-Snapshots and Backup.
- Snapshots:
- A local copy of your data in the storage with version history.
- This service is good for human errors like accidently deleting or editing files.
- Users can easily recover files from snapshots. See this wiki on how to recover from snapshots.
- This service adds an overhead on the space that is allocated for your requested quota. For fast storage there is a 20% percent overhead.
- No-Snapshots:
- No local copy or backups of the data.
- Data that is deleted or changed in a no-snapshot volume cannot be recovered or reverted to previous version!
- This option is good for scratch.
- Backup
- A copy of your files on a remote system, other than the storage.
- Users need to contact support to recover data from backup and it could take several hours.
Snapshots are NOT to be considered as backups! In case of a major failure in the storage, snapshots will also be lost along with the data.
To protect you from loosing you data in such a case you must use the backup service.
The different storage types and services are implemented by dividing the storage into several volumes.
- Each PI or lab gets a default quota of 1TB for fast storage only (No archiving). This holds for:
- /sci/labs/<PI_name>
- All user sub-folders (/sci/labs/<PI_name>/<username>
- Each user subfolder holds symlinks (shortcuts) to other storage volumes.
- Disk quotas can only be in increments of 1TB (that is, quotas cannot be for example 3.5TB).
- If your lab storage was migrated from an old cluster (bio-hpc, icore, hm, etc.) your quotas will be set to the nearest integer above your current used space.
See here or more information about quota management.