While SCIAMA does not provide any local backup storage for important data, it is now possible to move your important data directly onto a cloud service for long-term storage and back for further processing. A good choice would be GoogleDrive, for which every university member has an account with unlimited storage capacity, but besides this various other services are supported (but not all tested yet): e.g. Amazon Drive, Amazon S3, MS OneDrive, DropBox.

The following sections provide instructions on how to do so using GoogleDrive as an example.

We use rclone to access and modify the remote cloud drive (e.g. move data). This is provided by the rclone module on SCIAMA. To use it, simply load the cpython/2.7.16 or cpython/3.8.3 module on the command line using:

If you haven’t done so already, you have to configure your cloud storage now. Simply execute

Select (n) to configure a new storage or edit an existing one by selecting (e). In the former case, you are now asked to provide a name for this config (This will be the name of the ‘drive’ so you may want to keep it short and avoid special characters/white spaces in it, in this example ‘test_drive’).

You are then asked to select the type of storage (in this example (9) for Google Drive):

Leave the next two questions about the Google Client Application Id and Secret blank (i.e. hit <RETURN> )

Then use the autoconfig to tie the drive with your account (a browser window with a google login should open where you enter your credentials and allow the access
Once this is done successfully, you have to decide whether this should become a team drive or not (in this example, we chose against it):

Finally confirm all the settings and you finished the configuration. Your (Google Drive) storage should be listed now on top of the output of the main rclone menu alongside all your other configured storages.

To access and manipulate the remote storage filesystem, you have to use the rclone tool. There is a wide variety of commands available. The following is a list of those probably most useful for our users and their bash equivalents(for more commands and arguments, check ‘rconfig help’)

cat

same as in bash; Concatenates any files and sends them to stdout

copyto

in bash: cp -r; copies files/directories from source to destination

delete

in bash: rm -r; deletes content of path

ls,lsd,lsl

in bash: ls, ls -d, ls -l; lists content of path

mkdir

same as in bash; creates directory

moveto

in bash: mv; moves files or directories from source to destination

rcat

in bash: ‘>’; copies stdout into file

rmdir

same as in bash; removes empty directory

size

in bash: ‘du -s’; Prints the total size and number of objects in remote:path

sync

similar to rsync; Makes source and dest identical, modifying destination only.

Here an example for creating a directory on the remote storage in our example from the previous section and copying some files to and from it and deleting everything again on the remote storage: