User Program - While at the Beamline - Data Management and Backup

Supported media

GM/CA CAT recommends and supports external firewire (IEEE 1394) disks as inexpensive and fast way to backup users data. External USB disks can also be used, but one has to keep in mind that only USB 2.0 devices have data transfer speeds comparable with firewire; the speed for the USB 1.1 devices is 40 times lower.

In addition, GM/CA CAT runs gigabit network and users are welcome to SFTP or FTP out their data to their home institutions. External access to GM/CA computers is not available because of tight Argonne policies about cyber security.

Support for DVD disks is not provided because at the rate of 100GB of data per experiment one would have to burn more than 22 disks.

Supported formats on external firewire/USB disks are FAT32, NTFS and ext3. Disks formatted as NTFS should be connected to Windows computers only and disks formatted as ext3 are only compatible with Linux (GM/CA does not support MAC OS or other operating systems). The FAT32 filesystem is supposed to be readable on both Windows and Linux, but we have experienced problems writing FAST32 disks by some brands (e.g.
Maxtor) on Linux. Especially this was the case with a newer models having disks 127GB and up. These incompatibilities could be resulted in corrupted disk index table and lost files. The problems have been observed even when the disks were connected to Linux computers for reading data only. Therefore, we strongly recommend using FAT32 with Windows computers.

Firewire disks formatted as ext3 can be connected to any of the following Linux workstations at the beamline: bl1ws1, bl1ws2, bl1ws4, bl1ws6, bl2ws1, bl2ws2, bl2ws5, and bl2ws6. The procedure of mounting firewire disks under Linux operating system is described elsewhere