Workspaces in Research Cloud are volatile: after they cease to exist, they leave nothing behind. This applies to their data as well - any data stored on the workspace itself would be gone when a workspace is gone. However, you can connect persistent storage that will outlive your workspace and will keep the data for future use. One of the features that we provide for this is to connect your personal ResearchDrive account to workspaces you start.

Research Drive requires a personal user account to access it. In order to access your Research Drive storage from Research Cloud’s workspaces, Research Cloud will need to know your Research Drive’s identity.  To be able to link to ReseaerchDrive using this method you need a ResearchDrive account in your institute instance or in the SURF community instance that uses the same email address as your Research Cloud profile.

In the Research Cloud portal, you can establish this link by enabling your collaboration (CO) to reach your Research Drive space. If you want to attach your ResearchDrive account to workspaces started for another CO you have to link that CO through the Research Cloud portal as well.

For example in Linux based workspaces, your Research Drive will be mounted in the "researchdrive" folder in your home directory. 

Programmatic Access

This page describes the way to provide user-access to Research Drive. Most of the time this is what you want.

If you want to access Research Drive in a way that is not tied to a particular user, please consider to follow this tutorial.

Linking the ResearchDrive account to a CO

Let us prepare the Research Cloud portal to receive the Research Drive information:

  1. Navigate to the Research Cloud Portal.
  2. In the “Profile” tab go to the CO you want to link your Research Drive to in the profile section
  3. Choose the "Services" tab.
  4. Activate the switch for the Research Drive service.
  5. Authenticate to your Research Drive instance.
  6. Click “Authorise” to allow Research Drive be connected with the Research Cloud portal

   

Please, note that after entering your credentials it may take a while before it is visible on this page. After 5 minutes it should be processed. You research drive is connected after you see "Authorisation was successful" message on the screen.

Now your Research Drive is connected to any workspace that is running in the collaboration to which it is connected (even to the ones that have been started in the past).

Research Drive documentation

Knowledge base: Research Drive 

Documentation of the ResearchDrive service:  https://wiki.surfnet.nl/display/RDRIVE/Research+Drive

For more details check:  https://wiki.surfnet.nl/display/RDRIVE/How+to+upload+or+download+your+files 

Connected!

All workspaces of the collaboration will have a directory 'researchdrive' in the home directory.

Here, you can access your files and folders of the Research Drive instance you just connected.