Home Directories / Project Space / Scratch Space

Home Directories

Home directories are automatically given to everyone with a CS account. This space is backed up on a daily basis (for more information on backups and snapshots, please see this link). The amount of space depends on your default group.

Project Space

This space is intended for most storage needs that exceed the size of a home directory quota, including:

  • Groups who need to share files for a project or a class
  • Individuals working on projects too large for a home directory
  • Document Root filesystem(s) for virtual web servers (which can also be requested at left)

This is not the place for temporary files (these should go in the scratch area). The backup schedule for project space depends on choices made in the original request for the space.

You can request project space using the form on the left side of this page.

Project spaces are under /n/fs on cycles.  For example, project myproject will be in /n/fs/myproject.  Also note that project spaces are "automounted" meaning that when access is attempted by a given machine, the project space will be mounted at that time.  Furthermore, if the space is not yet mounted, doing an ls /n/fs/myproject will not mount it as an "ls" doesn't force an automount.  Instead, you can cd /n/fs/myproject to ensure it is mounted at which point an ls /n/fs/myproject will work as expected.

Scratch Space

Scratch space is available to everyone at /n/fs/scratch on any of our public login systems. Note that this is an automounted file system and you may have to "cd" to it before it is visible. You will be able to create your own top-level directory, and put anything you want into it. However, any file over two weeks old WILL BE DELETED automatically by a script which runs every night. This is NOT a place to put anything valuable for more than two weeks, as this space WILL NOT BE BACKED UP.