Storage and data management

Datastores

Prospero has the following datastores:

Type	Mount point	Capacity	For use by
Homespace	/users/	3.1 TB	All
Data storage	/mnt/scratch	3.6 PB	All
	/mnt/data1	220 TB	All
	/mnt/aridata1	233 TB	ARI members

Quotas

Each user’s homespace is limited to a quota of 30GB. Large datasets should be stored on the data volumes.

VSCode and Python environments such as conda can quickly fill your homespace with temporary hidden files (often caches) that may not show up with the du command. For example, check for directories such as .cache and .vscode-server. It is recommended that you move these directories to your personal user space on the scratch space /mnt/scratch/users/[USERNAME] and create softlinks from your homespace to these from their original location. For example:

$ cd ~

$ mv .vscode-server /mnt/scratch/users/[USERNAME]/

$ ln -s /mnt/scratch/users/[USERNAME]/.vscode-server .vscode-server

Backups

At present no volumes are backed up, so users are advised to keep their source code on a version control system and maintain their own backups. We hope to install a system to provide daily backups of the homespace during 2026.

Best practice

Please keep important code on the homespace and keep this backed up yourself. For most users, it is advised to keep data specific to personal projects in /mnt/scratch/users/[USERNAME]. Data for projects involving multiple users should be kept in /mnt/scratch/projects/[PROJECTNAME]. The volume /mnt/data1 is in principle available to all users but is a legacy system that predates the high-performance ClusterStor facility that hosts /mnt/archive.