File Systems

File Space

Global file space on Terra is available on all compute and login nodes. It is organized into the file systems shown in the table below. Access to the allocated file space is through the indicated directories that are setup automatically for every user.

File System	Directory	Environment Variable	Storage Hardware	File Space Quota	File Counts Quota	Comments
Home	/home/$USER	$HOME	DSS-G260	10 GB	10000	Upon login, you will be situated in /home/$USER. The use of this area is for small-to-modest amount of processing. Its space and file count limits are not extensible. This area is backed up on a nightly basis.
Scratch	/scratch/user/$USER	$SCRATCH	DSS-G260	1 TB	250000	This is a high performance storage, intended to temporarily hold rather large files, and only for on-going processing that uses them. It is NOT backed up nor is it intended as long-term storage area. Please delete or move out of these area any files that are not frequently used.

PIs may also establish shared group directories. Contact us or submit a request using the "Manage Groups" button in the Dashboard in the Terra portal.

Quotas & File Use

A user can run the showquota command to display file usage on Terra.

[username@terra ~]$ showquota

Your current disk quotas are:
Disk                  Disk Usage      Limit   File Usage      Limit
/home/username              1.4G      10.0G         3661      10000
/scratch/user/username    117.6G       1.0T        24226     250000
/scratch/group/groupdir   510.5G       1.0T       128523     500000

Transferring Files

Data transfer utilites scp, sftp, and rsync are available on the Terra login nodes. All Terra login nodes have 10 Gigbit Ethernet connection to the intra-campus network. These are suitable for small-to-medium sized data transfers, as transfer could be interrupted by 60 minute CPU process time limit on the Terra login nodes. We suggest "rsync" which supports intermittent transfer. For transferring large amount of data to or from off campus, use Globus Connect.

For transferring files on Terra to/from a Windows machine, we recommend MobaXterm. Use rclone to move data to/from cloud storage. In all cases, you will need to have set up two-factor authentication with Duo.

Please see file transfer KB page for more details on choices of transfer software and answers to frequently asked questions.