Usage & Lifecycle Policy¶

Usage Policy¶

• No backup of data!
• User data should go into user directories, group data should go into group directories
  • User data: Will only be available during the account is active
  • Group data: Dedicated quota, will remain available still after account inactivation
• What is user data? What should go to DUST, and what should not?
  • Derived data, e.g. small personal NTuples
  • Test copies for fast and easy access of primary/secondary data (large data sets should remain on dCache)
  • Job output, libs and binaries, ...
  • DUST is not intended for personal or personal-related data, hence such data should be stored elsewhere.

Lifecycle Policy¶

Data of Expired Accounts¶

Your NAF account has a limited lifetime. Usually, it gets created with a lifetime of three years. The lifetime can be extended. You will get notifications well before the expiration date, and you can contact your experiment supervisors and ask for prolongation.

An expired account can also be reactivated, for example because you return to an NAF institute after some years at a position abroad.

Note: This is different from the lifetime of your password! Your password has a maximum lifetime of six month. If you fail to change it, you need to contact your experiment supervisor, and you will get a new password. Your account will not expire because of an expired password!

Data Retention¶

You should organize clean-up of the data in your DUST-user directory before you leave/change your project/group/experiment, and before your NAF account expires. Clean-up means either deleting data, or transferring it to some other space.

Once your account expires or the respective DUST resource expires because of group/experiment change, your data in the DUST-user directory will be hidden in the filesystem. It remains on DUST disks, but is only accessible to IT admins.

A stub file will be added with the format /data/dust/user/<account>.README, informing that the directory is no longer accessible.

Recovery is possible either on written/e-mail request of your experiment supervisor or reactivation of the account. 180 days after hiding the dataset, the data from user directory will be deleted. No recovery will be possible afterwards