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Data Transfer and Backup

The most convenient method of transferring image files is with a user-supplied USB external hard drive. An archiver script has been set up to automate the task of copying data. Set up a directory in which all of your data will be collected. From the User Workstation your drive is connected to, open a terminal (not a data processing terminal), and simply type

archiver [somedir] /media/[drivename]
where somedir is the directory in your users directory that you want to transfer/backup and drivename is the name of your hard drive. The archiver script will then automatically backup all of the data collected in subsequent subdirectories as you collect.

  • Any USB drive must be FAT32 or ext2/ext3-formatted. NTFS-formatted external hard drives are not supported at this time.
    (Note that if an ext2/ext3 drive is read-only, its permissions can be set by running sudo chown users:[username] [drivename] as admin.)
  • While Windows XP can read and write to FAT32-formatted drives without any difficulty, its Disk Management facility cannot create individual FAT32 partitions larger than 32,768 MB. Instead, you can use this FAT32 format utility; please ensure the drive is empty before using. (See the author's page for more details.)
  • Firewire is not supported at this time.

Data Transfer via SSH

  • CLS uses Network Address Translation (NAT) for all Internet/IP traffic that leaves the facility, so the 10.108.X.X addresses will never be seen by external computers. The CLS public subnet is 128.233.135.0/24 so the "apparent" IP address of any CLS computer making a connection (e.g., via sftp) outside the facilty will appear in the range 128.233.135.49 to 128.233.135.249. This public address pool is shared dynamically by all computers within the facility, so a CLS computer may not always have the same external IP address.
  • This is the command to recursively copy a whole directory (not allowed in SFTP) from the local computer to a remote computer using secure copy SCP:
    scp -r LocalDirectory [username]@[remotecomputer]:/[absolutepath/][/remotecomputer][/username]
    For example,
    scp -r /data/directory001 user@computer.usask.ca:/home/user/directory
    (The command will prompt for a password.)