Scratch Tips

The scratch storage is on a large storage node with 2 raid arrays with 50TB of storage each. Your scratch will always be available at /nfs/scratch/<username>.

Your scratch storage could be on scratch or scratch2, to find out run vuw-quota.

Each user has a quota of 5TB on scratch - you can ask the support team to increase it if needed. While each user has a quota of 5TB, we don't actually have enough storage for each user to fill 5TB of storage! This is a shared resource and we will occasionally ask on the slack channel for users to clean up their storage to make space for others. Individuals using a large amount of scratch space may recieve an email.

To check how much space is free on the scratch storage for all users, on Rāpoi: 

df -h | grep scratch  #df -h is disk free with human units, | pipes the output to grep, which shows lines which contain the word scratch
On the slack channel in any DM or channel type 
/df-scratch
The output should only be visible to you

This storage is not backed up at all. It is on a raid array so if a hard drive fails your data is safe. However in the event of a more dramatic hardware failure, earthquakes or fire - your data is gone forever. If you accidentally delete something, it's gone forever. If an Admin misconfigures something, your data is gone (we try not to do this!).

It is your responsiblilty to backup your data here - a good place is to use Digital Solutions Research Storage (see Connecting to SoLAR).

Scratch is also not a place for your old data to live forever, please clean up datasets you're no longer using!