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Where are my files?
... and how do I get to them?
Your files can be stored in a number of places. When you're using DICE or a managed platform, accessing your files will mostly be seamless - but when you're using a self-managed machine, or you're in an unusual location (such as working from home), you may need to know where they are stored.
There are four likely locations:
| Location | Uses | How to Access | VPN required? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AFS | Non-admin home directories, group space | ⇒ AFS and filesystems | No | |
| DataStore | Admin home directories, admin group space, research group space, individual datastore areas | ⇒ Network Shares | Yes | In most cases, Datastore will be accessed via Samba (see below) |
| Samba | Some admin group areas | ⇒ Accessing Samba Shares | Yes | |
| NFS | Some research group areas | NFS data is not directly accessible from outside the School. You will need to ⇒ log in to a School machine to access this sort of data. | N/A |
It may be that you already know where the files you want are stored, or that you can work this out from the usage descriptions in the table above. If not, and if you are accessing the files from a DICE machine, simply cd to the files' location and run the command df .
If under 'Filesystem' it says 'AFS', then your data is on the AFS file system. Otherwise, your data is in NFS space.
For example, you can see that user fred's home directory is on AFS:
[example+]fred: cd [example+]fred: df . Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on AFS 2147483647 0 2147483647 0% /afs
If you are an admin user, then the files you are trying to access may be on Datastore, on Samba or (if you work in ISS) on AFS. If you think that you will need to access admin files remotely, we strongly advise you to ⇒ contact Support well in advance. They will be able to tell you where the files are located and show you how to access them.