Leaving UMN? What to Do
Before leaving the University, consider performing these tasks to in order to retain access to your data after losing access to MSI systems.
Warning
Access to MSI systems is dependent on the active status of your University of Minnesota user account. The following should be taken into consideration before access is closed.
Data Access and File Permissions
Principal Investigators
Utilize the storage dashboard in MyMSI for your project and identify which users own data within the project space.
We recommend encouraging your departing lab members to follow the guidance below before they leave the University.
Our Help Desk can assist with restoring access to data that is owned by inactive accounts. Request an ‘inactive user data release’ and provide a list of internetids of users that have data you need access to. 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
While your account is active, we advise opening up permissions before your account is set as inactive. 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
Downloading Your Data
There are a few options depending on where data should be copied to, these 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, reach out to help@msi.umn.edu.
The rclone package is available as a module that can be loaded into the session.
rclone/1.74.4-r0