Workspaces in Research Cloud are volatile: after they cease to exist, they leave nothing behind. A "bare" workspace does have a file system where data can be stored. But this file system is only located on the workspace's system disk. Any data stored there will be gone when the workspace is gone. You can connect persistent storage that will outlive your workspace and will keep the data for future use.

Another solution is to connect your personal Research Drive account to workspaces you start. Research Drive then can act as your backup and data management and sharing facility.

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 has to be able to connect to your Research Drive account.  

In the Research Cloud portal, you can establish this link per collaboration. But still, this connection is only accessible for you. Other collaboration members can only see their own Research Drive access, if they connected it.

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

On Windows workspaces a "R:" drive will represent your Research Drive account.

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 following this tutorial.

Linking the Research Drive account to a collaboration

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 collaboration 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. To prevent your browser from blocking pop-up windows, you will be prompted with the following dialog (see the image below) where you can either copy the link manually or open the link in a new tab.
  5. Authenticate to your Research Drive instance in the newly opened tab.
  6. Click “Authorise” to allow Research Drive to 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 of the current collaboration,  even to the ones that have been started in the past.

Research Drive documentation

Documentation of the Research Drive 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 Linux workspaces of the collaboration will have a directory 'researchdrive' in the home directory.

Windows workspaces will have an "R:" drive.

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

Writing to "read-only" paths will fail silently

A part of your Research Drive access may be read-only. If you attempt to write to a read-only path, the action will fail silently. You will not be notified in any way, and the file will not be written/changed. Make sure that you know which paths on your Research Drive are read-only. If in doubt, just try to move a file, there. Then check if it is actually present, on Research Drive.