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File Transfer

Prerequisites

To work through these guides you must

  • Be a member of a project in the BriCS portal
  • Have followed the instructions in Getting Started to set up SSH login and create a valid SSH certificate for authenticating to BriCS facilities (using the clifton command line tool)
  • PROJECT and FACILITY within this page correspond to the values that appear in SSH host names generated by clifton, as described in the Login guide

Command-line tools

This guide outlines a procedure to transfer files to and from BriCS facilities by running command-line tools on your local machine.

scp

Having setup ssh access as described in Getting Started, you can use scp to transfer files over SSH protocol. For example to copy remote_file.txt from the remote login node, the following can be used:

scp PROJECT.FACILITY.isambard:remote_file.txt .

To copy local_file.txt to the remote login node, the following can be used:

scp local_file.txt PROJECT.FACILITY.isambard:

To copy a directory -r can be used with scp. For example:

scp -r local_dir PROJECT.FACILITY.isambard:

rsync

Rsync is a popular tool to synchronise directories and files across a network. This is similar to scp access where the following can be used to copy a remote file:

rsync -avz PROJECT.FACILITY.isambard:remote_file.txt .

Likewise, to copy a local file:

rsync -avz local_file.txt PROJECT.FACILITY.isambard:

The -a option enables recursive directory copying. For example:

rsync -avz local_dir PROJECT.FACILITY.isambard:

Graphical interfaces

There are number of graphical file transfer programs and we currently do not provide specific instructions for a particular program.

As an alternative, if you simply want to view and work with your remote files using a graphical interface (rather than transferring them to your local machine), consider using Visual Studio Code or Jupyter notebooks.