Skip to content

Research Data Store

General Information

The Research Data Store (RDS) is a fast and secure central storage service for active or working research data. There are various options for presenting your data to your PC/Workstation/Mac on campus (or through the University’s Remote Access Service) as a local drive.

See the RDS How To Guides for information on how to access your RDS project and RDS home directories from a variety of devices whether they are University-managed or your own.

Transferring Data

If you need to transfer large amounts of research data with either external people or organisations, there are a number of options. In all cases, when transferring data, you should take appropriate measures to ensure that sensitive data is protected or encrypted prior to the transfer being undertaken.

Troubleshooting

Please see below for information on how to troubleshoot common issues on the RDS.

Home Directory Quota

Warning

Home directories on the RDS have a limited quota of 20 GB, which will not be increased. However, it should be noted that home directories are only for the storage of small files, e.g. configs, SSH keys etc. – any other content, e.g. research data, job scripts & output files, should be stored in an RDS Project directory.
You can view a list of your BEAR projects and their respective directory paths via BEAR Admin.

If your home directory is running low on remaining quota you will receive a warning when logging on to BlueBEAR or using BEAR Portal. Please do not ignore these warnings; running low on available storage in your home directory can result in various issues which may not be simple to debug.

  • To view information on your quota, please run the my_quota command:

    $ my_quota
Your home directory on RDS and Bluebear (/rds/homes/a/auser):
You are using 25.00 percent ( 5.00 GB ) of your total quota 20.00 GB

  • To see how much data each of your home directory’s subdirectories are using, run the following command in a BlueBEAR terminal:

    You can increase the depth of directory recursion in the du command by increasing the value that you pass to the --max-depth option.

    du --human-readable --max-depth 1 ~