There are a lot of things to say about having data on your local machine. Sometimes the dataset is just too big, but there are also privacy and security concerns.

The policy of your project or your institution may not even allow research data on local devices. The best way to manage your data is to keep it in a secure cloud environment at all times. SURF provides a lot of options for research data management.

That being said, sometimes you do have data on a local device and you need to get it to your workspace in Research Cloud. This is when the free "Cyberduck" tool can be used.


Cyberduck

Cyberduck is a free application that is available for macOS and Windows.

You can download it at https://cyberduck.io

Don't click on possible download buttons of the adverts that may pop up. You need one of these downloads (or similar):

SFTP, SSH

Cyberduck can use a variety of transfer protocols. We will use SFTP, which is based on SSH.

You may have been using SSH with Research Cloud, anyway. I that case you can just start with creating the Cyberduck connection below.

If you still have to enable a SSH connection to a workspace, you can follow the steps on our page about logging in to your workspace with SSH.

The steps for getting your public/private keypair and for registering the public key with SRAM are also required here. And logging in to the workspace with SSH is a good test of the SSH connection.

Creating the Cyberduck connection

You start setting up a connection with this icon:

In the following form,

  • select "SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol)"
  • Enter the workspace's ip address
  • Enter your username as given on the "Profile" tab of the Research Cloud portal
  • Select the keypair (you registered the public key of this keypair with SRAM, earlier)

Extra information about using the SFTP protocol in Cyberduck can be found here: https://docs.cyberduck.io/protocols/sftp/

Moving data around

After connecting you will see your home folder on the workspace in the Cyberduck window. We advise you to copy data to an attached persistent volume, which is shown as a subfolder in the "data" folder using the volume name from the SURF Research cloud platform. In this example: "demo-storage-volume".


For SANE data providers

If you are a data provider in a SANE system, you can start a "Data Provider Portal" workspace.

Follow the steps above to connect to the workspace with Cyberduck.

The provided data is to be placed in


<home-folder>/data/sane-data


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