Leaving UMN? What to Do
Before leaving the University, perform these tasks to retain access to your data or to allow your group members continued access to their data.
Warning
Once you leave the University, you will lose access to MSI systems.
Principal Investigators
If you want to take your data with you to your new institution, see moving your project data. If you have troubles with access to move your project data (e.g., “permission denied), contact the Help Desk and we can help (e.g., checking permissions).
Your MSI project(s) will stay open until the next renewal period starting Jan 1, unless you request that your project be closed. Users on your project who are still at the University will retain their access to the project space and their home directories until the project closes.
If you want to retain access to your project and/or if you want your group members to retain access to the project (e.g., graduate students who need access until they graduate), you can ask your department for a POI account with the University. This type of UMN account will allow you to retain your PI status for your project(s) and retain MSI access.
Utilize the storage dashboard in MyMSI for your project and identify which users own data within the project space.
Contact our Help Desk to restore access to data that are owned by inactive accounts (e.g., former students who have left the University). Request an ‘inactive user data release’ and provide a list of internetids of users that have data you need access to.
You can also check yourself: for a breakdown of data owned by each member within the project space, open a remote shell, and use the following command:
# Show your current groups
groups
# Select one of the groups, and display the usage per user
groupquota -a -g <project name>
# Show only users that are marked as former
groupquota -a -g <project name> | grep -vi 'current'
Group Members
Ensure your PI and other group members have access to your project space data. The following commands may be used to grant read/write access to your data for all group members.
# start an interactive session
srun -n 10 --mem 5G -p interactive -t 30 --pty bash
# load parallel module
module load parallel
# Copy/paste BOTH lines
find $SHARED -maxdepth 1 -user $USER |\
parallel --bar -j 10 'chmod -R g+rwX,o=- {} 2>$SHARED/$(date +"%m%d%y-%H%M")_${USER}_file_perm_error.log'
Note
The commands above will produce a error log file in $SHARED, it points out any files whose permissions could not be updated due to being owned by other members of the group. If you need assistance, contact the Help Desk and we may help perform a data release to update directories with a mix of ownership.
The log file will be named similar to 08_13_26-1256_vega0051_file_perm_error.log and can be viewed with:
cat $SHARED/<file name>.log
If you want to take your own data with you to your new institution, see moving your project data
Ensure your PI owns any Tier 2 buckets (this is true for all buckets created after 2024). If it is a bucket that you created as a group member, it needs to be transferred to your PI. Contact the Help Desk to do this.
Moving Your Project Data
There are a few options depending on where you want to move your data, below are some of the general choices. Note, this only applies to data that you currently have access to.
Tip
As a PI, if there are former lab members who have data that you need access to, contact help@msi.umn.edu and we can help change ownership of the data over to your account.
Transfer to a Local Machine Using Globus
Users that need to download data to a local machine or external hard drive are advised to make use of Globus Connect Personal to create a local endpoint. This provides a high throughput option to copy data from Tier 1 and/or Tier 2 directly to a local machine. See our page on using Globus
Transfer to Another Institution
Users moving to another Institution with access to Globus, can transfer data by utilizing the shared collection feature. See our page on using Globus
Transfer to Cloud Storage
Rclone is what we generally recommend for moving data to/from common cloud storage providers such as Google Drive and Box Storage. If you need guidance on setting it up on MSI, contact the Help Desk.
The rclone package is available as a module that can be loaded into the session.
rclone/1.74.4-r0
Tip
Contact the Help Desk with any questions!