Files of leaving 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 the sponsor is allowed to access files owned or produced by a sponsored user, even in contexts where you may exercise control over a filesystem quota.
Just as team 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 in other research projects.
It is therefore important to make arrangements with sponsored users 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 sponsored users agree to the storage access policy in their CCDB account (CCDB) under My Account/Agreements tab.
Here are some actions you should take while you are still in contact with a user who is leaving the group:
- If there are many such files, ask the student to compress them first with tar, czf , zip, or some other such tool. If you need help with tar you can have a look at handling large collections of files wiki page. For directory access permissions, you can review the Sharing data wiki page and its parent page Storage and file management. If you need further assistance, you can contact technical support.
- Ask the student 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 student 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 sponsored user's account to your own before this person leaves. If the user 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 for your own.
The Alliance policy regarding Terms of Use states that files associated with expired accounts may be removed after one year.