Data migration from Vital-IT to Baobab

[ this post is only for users coming from Vital-IT ; if you don’t know what Vital-IT is, you can stop reading this and go on with your day ! ]

Dear former Vital-IT users,

We have been preparing everything to move your data from Vital-IT to Baobab.
This is a very long and tedious task, because there is a lot of data (550+ TB, 41+ million files). File permissions (user/group) also need to be adapted from one system to the other (user and group must be changed on each file), so this not just a simple cut/paste operation.

At the beginning of January, we will start the final step. When this final step will be over, the data will be available like this :

  • /data (on Vital-IT) will be available in /srv/<share_name>/data (on Baobab)
  • /archive (on Vital-IT) will be available in /srv/<share_name>/archive (on Baobab)
  • /home/<user> folder will be moved directly in your home folder on Baobab : $HOME/old_home_vital_it

When using Baobab, the share /srv/<share_name> is only accessible from the login node. If you need to access the data from this share from a compute node, then the best solution is to copy (or move) data from the share to $HOME/scratch.
Your $HOME and $HOME/scratch are both accessible from all nodes (compute and login nodes).

Bear in mind that there is no backup of the scratch space (read all about it: https://baobabmaster.unige.ch/enduser/src/enduser/enduser.html#home-directory).

Also, feel free to do some clean up if you realise there are some files you don’t need any more ! You will feel lighter and so will our storage system !

Cheers,

Massimo

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