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Intermediate Archive

With the "Intermediate Archive", ZIH is closing the gap between a normal disk-based filesystem and Long-term Archive. The Intermediate Archive is a hierarchical filesystem with disks for buffering and tapes for storing research data.

Its intended use is the storage of research data for a maximal duration of 3 years. For storing the data after exceeding this time, the user has to supply essential metadata and migrate the files to the Long-term Archive. Until then, she/he has to keep track of her/his files.

Some more information:

  • Maximum file size in the archive is 500 GB (split up your files, see Datamover)
  • Data will be stored in two copies on tape.
  • The bandwidth to this data is very limited. Hence, this filesystem must not be used directly as input or output for HPC jobs.

Access the Intermediate Archive

For storing and restoring your data in/from the "Intermediate Archive" you can use the tool Datamover. To use the Datamover you have to login to ZIH systems.

Store Data

marie@login$ dtcp -r /<directory> /archiv/<project or user>/<directory> # or
marie@login$ dtrsync -av /<directory> /archiv/<project or user>/<directory>
# example:
marie@login$ dtcp -r /scratch/marie/results /archiv/marie/ # or
marie@login$ dtrsync -av /scratch/marie/results /archiv/marie/results

Restore Data

marie@login$ dtcp -r /archiv/<project or user>/<directory> /<directory> # or
marie@login$ dtrsync -av /archiv/<project or user>/<directory> /<directory>
# example:
marie@login$ dtcp -r /archiv/marie/results /scratch/marie/ # or
marie@login$ dtrsync -av /archiv/marie/results /scratch/marie/results

Listing files in archive

The intermediate archive is not mounted on the login nodes, but only on the export nodes.

In order to list the user's files in the archive use the dtls command

marie@login$ dtls /archiv/$USER/