Page History

...

LCLS is committed to providing its users with their data in a timely and convenient fashion. Experiment data and metadata collected at LCLS may be stored at and retrieved from the facility for a period of ten years. The data retention practices described in this page are on a best effort basis, they depend on availability of the actual resources and may change at any time if these resources become unavailable. Historically we have been able to deliver on these lifetimes (with the exception of scratch where, twice, we had to delete data newer than 4 months), but we cannot guarantee them: available resources depend on the actual usage rate and available funding, which we do not fully control.

Policy by Folder

 For older experiments this folder is called res instead of results

...

• The results space is used to save the final results from the data processing of an experiment.
• The limits are 4TB and no more than 10,000 files. If you need to store many small files put them into a tar or zip file.
• If limits are exceeded the results folder will be disabled.
• Don't use results for intermediate output use scratch instead.

hdf5 and hdf5/smalldata folder

• the experiment is allowed to create files in hdf5/smalldata
• the folder MUST contain only hdf5 files translated from xtc
• non hdf5 files (logs, code, ...) will be deleted
• the hdf5 files are archived after they are 4 weeks old

Notes

• Please do not store under the scratch folder data that you cannot recreate because this directory is not backed up and the oldest files on scratch may be deleted at any time to make space for data from new experiments.
• For files file cleanup inscratch/,   the  last access time will be used for removing old files  (Updated 2024-04).
  For files in results/ and calib/ the age is determined using last modification time of a file (not access time).
  For the xtc and hdf5 files the access time is used (see  xtc/hdf5 cleanup).
  
• The tape archive (xtc, hdf5, usrdaq) and the tape backup (results, home) are fundamentally different:
  • In the tape archive the folders are frozen after the end of the experiments and their contents are stored on tape once. 
  • In the tape backup, the system takes snapshots of the folders as appear at a given time. This implies that files which are deleted from disk are eventually, i.e. after a long enough time, also deleted from tape. 
• Files under xtc and hdf5 can be restored from tape using the file manager tab in the electronic logbook. Files under home can be restored by the user following the instructions below.  To restore data from results send an email to cdspcds-datamgt-l@slac.stanford.edu.
• For raw data the cleanup operations will affect all files, i.e. all streams and chunks, which make up one run, rather than individual files.
• After 2 years from the end of an experiment we'll remove the experiment from disk. At that point we'll take a snapshot of the results and calib folders and archive them to tape so that we can, upon request, restore an entire experiment back to disk.
• After 10 years we plan to remove the tapes with the archived raw data from the silos and store them in a safe environment.
• The new policy will apply to all experiments, i.e. it will be retroactive, and its deployment date will coincide with the start of Run 14 (August 10^th 2016).
• For questions regrading the data retention and data access send your question to: pcds-datamgt-l@slac.stanford.edu.

...

• Please do not store large files under your home, this space is meant for code/scripts, documents, etc, not science data.
• Users can check the used and available space under their home with a command like:

df -h ~<username>

• Users can automatically access snapshots of the backup of their home here:

~<username>/.zfs/snapshot/

Cleanup of xtc and hdf5 data

Anchor
purgedata purgedata

...

The purging thresholds might vary depending on the size of a file system and its usage but typically are 5% and 10% (minimum/maximum threshold).  Using these three rules we try to keep runs that are actively analysed analyzed for as long as possible on disk and providing sufficient disk space for the ongoing experiment.

Restore of files

The xtc and hdf files are archived to tape and can be restored to disk in case runs were purged from disk. Restores are requested using the FileManager of the experiments eLog. A basic guide to the UI is described in  Managing Files.

The requests are sent to a queue which is monitored by a process that will retrieve the files from tape. The restore time might vary from tens of minutes to many days depending on the amount of data to be restored but also how busy the tape system is. In particular if high throughput experiments are running the restore will take a backseat. 

Rationale for Proposed Policy

...