General directives for migration

This article is a draft

This is not a complete article: This is a draft, a work in progress that is intended to be published into an article, which may or may not be ready for inclusion in the main wiki. It should not necessarily be considered factual or authoritative.

Notes for users to prepare for Data Migration

This page is dedicated to users of Compute Canada clusters concerned by the process of data migration. It is also useful for other users since it explains how to proceed when it comes to transfer your data from one place to another between Compute Canada facilities and its regional partners (ACENET, Calcul Quebec, Compute Ontario and WestGrid). You will find the best practices and useful links related to [Archiving] and [Transfer] or data migration. In this page, you will find some tips, instructions and links on how to prepare your data and archives to facilitate the migration process. Cleaning your directories and archiving your data is part of migration process. Here, we give you some information and tips on what to do before, during and after the migration process.

What to do before the migration starts?

It is always a good practice to go through your directories on your working directories to check what data you have and how their structure is in your directories. In most of the clusters, each user on CC has two working directories: /home/your_user_name and /global/scratch/your_user_name (in some clusters the path your directories may be different). Each user needs to go through his or her directories to check their structure and start organizing and cleaning them as needed, especially before proceeding with data migration. You should reduce the amount of the files you need to migrate by using archiving utilities and removing any unnecessary data.

Taking some time to organize and clean your directories now is not a waste of time because you will considerably speed up your migration process and give you the opportunity to better manage your data on the new system(s) to retrieve your files more quickly in the near future when you will be looking for them. These are some of recommended practices:

• Look at your data and see how your directories are structured and stored in your directories.
• Clean your data and directories by removing any unnecessary files you do not need.
• If you build programs in your home directory, start by removing all object files and keep only source files and configuration files to be able to rebuild your applications in the new clusters.
• The main goal from this preparation process that consists on cleaning and archiving your data is to find a good and best way to monitor your data and for better handling of the migration process. It is easier for the secure copy protocol or file transfer programs to migrate one archive file of a reasonable size than migrating thousands of small files. These files could be archived and compressed to reduce their size. To avoid any interruption or slowing down of the migration process, it is recommended to transfer archives rather than the whole directory with all files individually.
• Identify large data that can be compressed separately (this will save space and speed up the migration process).
• Identify the directories with large number of small files and use archiving and compressing utilities. When it comes to transfer files or data from one system to another, it is much faster for example to transfer an archive file [archive.tar.gz or archive.tar.bz2] that has for example 1000 small files than transferring the 1000 files individually. As an example to see why it is important to archive and compress your data, some files (especially those in text format) can be reduced by more than 50 % of their initial size. The compression of some files is very low but if you have hundreds or thousands of those files, you will find that you can reduce your space by 5 to 10 % or more. The numbers here are just indications to have an idea because the compression rate depend on the type of your data and in which format they are write. For images and binaries for example, the compression rate is very low, however for text data, it can be more than 60 %.
• If you are migrating data from more than one place to a unique final destination, you may think about a better way to do not have the same names. If you do so, the first data you moved will be replaced by the last ones. To avoid these situations, it may be necessary to prepare directories according to the initial place where you moved your data. This will help you retrieve and recognize easily the origin of your data.
• Choose carefully the names of the archives and be sure to do not give the same name to two different archives especially if you put them on the same directory.
• Try to have a more cleaned and structured directories.
• Check if your data are duplicated. It is not necessary to transfer the same file twice.
• list item Read carefully the instruction on how to prepare data archives by visiting [web page].
• Try some test files to see how all the archiving utilities work and how to use the transfer tools.
• Read carefully the instruction on how to use [[1]] for file transfer. Other tools can be used to transfer but it is recommended to migrate your Data between Compute Canada facilities using [[2]]. You can start by transferring few files and find out how it works.

What to do during the migration process?

• Be patient. Migrating data from one site to another can be long and time consuming. Depending on the amount of data you have and how many users are going to migrate their data, this process can be scheduled over few days.
• if you have a huge amount of data to transfer, do not stay till the last minute to start the migration. Depending on how much data you have, it can take a while to finish the transfer. This is another reason to prepare archives before migrating your data.
• Once your directories are cleaned and your data compressed, you can start the migration process to the new facilities using the Globus file transfer protocol.
• Do not try to migrate the whole data at once. Depending on the number of users and the amount of the data to migrate, the file system can slow down and stops. If it happens, the migration process will take longer.
• Make a schedule to migrate your data part by part. With this strategy, you can control what data you migrate. If for any reason, the system stops or your connection interrupted you will be able to try again later to migrate the same data instead of starting again if you tried to migrate your whole data or directories at once.
• Make sure to check out that the process did not stop after you started the migration. For this reason, it is highly recommended to migrate your data part by part.
• Be sure that you did not miss anything of your data if the migration process requires more time. It may be necessary to create a new directory with a name like Data_Migrated for example. The idea is to move any data you already migrated to this directory when you are sure that the data is in the destination cluster. The next time, you want to continue with the migration process, you will just look at the data outside this directory and you will not ask yourself or have to check again in the destination directory if your data have already been transferred or not. You may also keep records of the data you moved to see what is left to migrate and make a schedule to do it within the period dedicated for the migration (sooner is better than waiting to the last minute).
• Make sure that the data you are about to transfer are not corrupted. This can be achieved by different means (compare the file size on your local directory and the destination directory, try to check your data if they are not altered or corrupted during the migration process. To do so, you can look at your data using some utilities (to learn more [this page]).

What to do after migration?

• Connect to the remote machine and check out that your data is there and compare the size of your archives between the initial and final destination. If there is a problem during the migration, the system may copy part of the archive and not the whole file. You may see the archive name but its size will be different from the original one. In this case, the data may be corrupted and you will not be able to retrieve all your data. You have to transfer again this particular file or archive. For more details about how to check if your data is not corrupted during the migration process can be found on the following link: [and Compressing Data for Migration].

• Organizer your data on your new working directories on the new clusters.

Where and how to get HELP?

• To know how to use different archiving and compression utilities, use the Linux command like man <command> or <command> --help. Most common commands and useful examples can be found on the [and Compressing page].

• Ask around you for more help and clarification.
• Contact Migration support team by email: (no email provided yet)

Globus is a file transfer service