ICS Home Directory

• The school provides an ICS home directory for every member of the ICS community.
• The ICS home directory is, typically, automatically available on any ICS managed Windows and Linux system.
• That ICS home directory is available to any computer connected to the Campus Network(even via VPN).
• Backed up twice daily

Any time you login to an ICS managed Windows or Linux computer you will be presented with the same home directory and files as any other managed host at ICS.

The School of ICS provides an ICS home directory for every member of the ICS community, including faculty, staff, grad and ugrad students, and visitors. That ICS Home Directory is available to any ICS computer, any computer on the UCI campus, and any computer connected to the Campus VPN. The ICS home directory is automatically mounted on any ICS managed Linux or Windows host. Your home directory may be mounted via sshfs or Samba from any unmanaged host.

Home directories are automatically mounted on /home/<username> via NFS by the autofs service.

Home directories are typically mapped as the H: drive at login time via the Samba service.

Follow these instructions to mount your home directory via sshfs or Samba from any host connected to the campus network.

Beginning Fall 2021, all home directories are being stored on a new Purestorage Flashblade named tardigrade.ics.uci.edu, occasionally abbreviated as tg.ics.uci.edu.

Highlights:

• Backed by all flash storage so home directory access is fast
• Redundant 40Gb/s uplink to the ICS Data Center Backbone
• Inline compression (data reduction factor of ~1.6)
• 28 days of self service snapshots + long term disaster recovery backups

Typically, there are two types of storage systems at ICS.

Network file system, NFS, is available on every managed ICS system. On Linux, NFS is managed by the automounter (autofs) service. Anything under /home, /extra/, or /auto is NFS and autofs managed. On Windows or Mac systems, the space is available via CIFS or SMB and mapped as a network drive. This is also included in /home/ and /extra/.

NFS Pros:

• Available everywhere
• Backups
• Hourly snapshots
• Access control
• Quotas

NFS cons:

• Only as fast as the network
• Expensive: RAID + Snapshots + Fast Network are not cheap

Local file systems are backed by local physical media and are only available on filesystems they are physically attached to. Most systems have local storage exposed for all users in /scratch or /tmp. Some faculty and researchers purchase extra and that's made available via /srv/disk# or srv/nvme#.

LocalFS Pros:

• Cheap
• Fast
• Abundant

LocaFS Cons:

• Scratch only, no backup
• Localhost only.
• Available over network via slower protocols, fuse or sshfs

The following chart lists current quota limits for home directories that are on Tardigrade. There are no limits on the number of files a user may own. Quota only counts what is in your /home/*username* directory.

Are you getting an over quota message but when running df -h it shows that there TBs of available space?

# df . -h
Filesystem         Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tardigrade:/ugrad   99T   13T   86T  13% /net/tardigrade/ugrad

The command is returning the size of physical filesystem. Your quota is what is listed in the table above. If you would like to know how much space you're using, please run du -sh /home/your_username. This command could take a few minutes depending on how much data is in your home directory.

Self service Snapshots are available to all users for file recovery for the previous four weeks (28 days).

Backups to tape are made once per month. Our goals is to keep a quarterly copy of the each home directory on tape for two or more years. Contact ICS Computing Support Helpdesk if you feel you require a file recovery that is no available via snapshots.

Files or directories called “scratch” and some video and audio files will be excluded from backups.