Manage your personal and shared data
When you start a Nightingale computing instance, we automatically mount three volumes. These are network volumes that can be simultaneously mounted to many instances.
/home/ngsci: Your personal$HOMEdirectory/home/ngsci/project: Shared storage for all members of your project/home/ngsci/datasets: A read-only copy of Nightingale data
Data outside of these directories is ephemeral. Anything you save elsewhere will not persist between instance restarts.
Personal home storage
Home volumes are free and limited to 2 GB.
All your Nightingale instances attach the same private storage at $HOME .
This data:
- Is available only to you
- Persists across restarts
- Is the same in every instance across all your Nightingale OS projects
Shared project storage
Similarly, a special subdirectory at $HOME/project attaches shared storage that allows you to collaborate with other people who are members of a given project.
Project data:
- Is available to all members of a project
- Persists across restarts
- Only lives inside that project, i.e., the contents of
$HOME/projectwill be different in each of your projects
Other special subdirectories
Besides the project directory, there are other special directories in your user home. In particular, you've probably noticed the read-only datasets directory.
Basically, your home directory is identical in every instance that you create, except for the the project directory, which will differ across projects.
Data outside your home directory does not persist
⚠️ If you saved anything outside your home directory, such as installing packages into the default Python virtual environment located at /opt/venv/default , that data may will lost between instance restarts.
Instead of doing this, you should create and manage your own private virtual environments. See Related Articles for help.