1. Home
  2. Docs
  3. Migrating from Legacy to ...
  4. Home directories

Home directories

Migrating your home directory data from Legacy to GCE is quite simple, however please take note of the following changes between Legacy and GCE.  Home Directories and Project Directories is a useful resource on the policies, but the short version is your homedir is 50GB and only readable by you, and anything shared should be a project directory.

These instructions presume you’re new to GCE and have not migrated any data.  The instructions below will overwrite any files in your GCE homedir that match existing files in Legacy.  If you’ve already migrated or created data, you will want a more targeted approach.

Prior to the migration, ensure your Legacy home directory data will fit in the new homedir.  SSH to login.mcs.anl.gov and run the command

df -h

As long as the “Used” column is below 50G, you should be okay.  If it’s not, and you’re not sure what you can excise, please reach out to us at [email protected] and we’ll work with you on a solution.  If you have terabytes of data, it would be best to store that in Project directory space.  The hardware providing home directories is optimized for speed and will get quite expensive to store large amounts of data.  Also, home directories are generally not accessible to others.  Any data you want to share should be in a project directory.

If you’ve got the space for it, then to migrate your data from Legacy to GCE, login to your GCE account via SSH to one of the GCE homedir servers (homes.cels.anl.gov).

After you’ve logged in, you can initiate the sync using the command:

rsync -avzh legacyusername@login.mcs.anl.gov:~/ ~/ 2>legacy-rsync-errors

Be sure to replace legacyusername with your username in the legacy environment. It may not be the same one as in GCE.  The “2>legacy-rsync-errors” will help capture any errors that might occur. If you get errors at the end, look there to see what might have happened.

Please note that the “2>legacy-rsync-errors” will only work in bash, sh and zsh.  If you are using csh or tcsh, just use:

rsync -avzh legacyusername@login.mcs.anl.gov:~/ ~/

In this case any errors will be directed to your terminal output.

The rsync will take some time. If you’re familiar with the unix screen command, you may want to run it in a screen session.  If it fails, you can run the above command from a GCE home node and it will pick up where it left off.

If you want to exclude certain directories, you can look at the man page for rsync or ask us for help.

NOTE: This method will overwrite the public_html link with the legacy location.  To fix this, after you’ve moved everything, run the following command on the GCE home server to restore the link:

ln -sf /nfs/pub_html/gce/homes/gceusername ~/public_html

This will restore the proper link location.  Be sure to change gceusername to your gce username.