Where can I store what kind of data?

VSC provides multiple storage solutions with different strengths and capabilities to cover all stages of data management in the research life cycle. A general description of the different personal storage locations available to all VSC accounts is described in Storage locations.

• All VSC compute clusters have access to a common Data directory, so-called VSC_DATA. This storage is reliable to save your data and convenient to move it across different clusters. However VSC_DATA might not be particularly fast.

• The fastest storage in terms of I/O is the Scratch space of each compute cluster, so-called VSC_SCRATCH. This storage is the default choice to store data used by computational jobs. The limitation of the scratch is that it is not shared across multiple VSC clusters and files might be deleted after a certain time.

• Structured data needs special treatment and VSC provides an object store specically designed to handle such data in the Tier-1 Data Service.