Access to files of users leaving a project
This page is primarily directed at Principal Investigators who have sponsored users.
During annual renewals, you may indicate that some of your sponsored users will not be continuing as a part of your research team. This may lead to the deactivation of their accounts, which may in turn restrict your ability to access their files. Because intellectual property rules vary depending on the situation, we do not automatically assume that you the sponsor are allowed to access files owned or produced by group members, even in contexts where you may exercise control over a filesystem quota.
Just as group members who quit are expected to return their office keys after having cleaned out their office, it’s logical to expect similar behaviour concerning data stored in their account on a cluster. These data should be transferred to another member of the research group so that they can be sorted and either deleted (freeing up valuable space) or kept for later use.
It is therefore important to make arrangements with a group member before their account is deactivated, to mitigate the risk of them becoming incommunicado in subsequent months.
The easiest way to avoid any problem is that your group members agree to the storage access policy in their CCDB account (CCDB) under My Account/Agreements tab.
Here are some actions you should take while the departing user's account is still active:
- If they own many files, ask the user to compress them first with
tar, zip, or some other such tool. For help with archiving data, see Handling large collections of files. For directory access permissions, see the Sharing data wiki page and its parent page Storage and file management. For further assistance, contact technical support. - Ask the user to identify any data that should be archived and copy them to a portable USB drive, an external hard drive you may have in your lab, or to your own account on an Alliance system. Lots of copies keep stuff safe!
- On the other hand, storage is limited and can be expensive, so once any important data have been secured, ask the user to delete everything that can reasonably be deleted.
- If there is anything you have good reason to keep on Alliance storage systems, move it from the user's account to your own before this person leaves. If the person becomes incommunicado, intellectual property rules may delay or even forbid us from moving data from this account to your own. IP rules vary from institution to institution, so it would be wise to familiarize yourself with those rules for your own sake.
The Alliance policy regarding Terms of Use states that files associated with expired accounts may be removed after one year. Contact us to know if these data have been migrated to tape.