Ranch System Replacement
Data Migration Instructions for all Users

Last update: March 10, 2026

Notices

• 10/20/2025 You may now use Globus Online to manage transfers between New Ranch and Old Ranch.
• 10/08/2025 VSCode users: Accessing Ranch and managing transfers via VSCode is prohibited. Ranch is an archival file system, not a computational resource. Please use a terminal application to manage your Ranch data.

09/24/2025 Over the next year, TACC's archival data system, Ranch,, will undergo a complete system replacement, requiring all current Ranch users to curate, then migrate, all their Ranch data from the old to the new system.

Since this is a total system replacement, and not an upgrade to existing hardware, all data on the current (Old) Ranch must be MANUALLY COPIED OVER to the New Ranch system, by the respective data's owner, in order to save it permanently. Data on Old Ranch will NOT automatically transfer to New Ranch. You are responsible for migrating your own data that is stored on Old Ranch, either in your personal directory, or in a designated Project space, prior to the end of November, 2026.

Technical Information

Ranch will transition from the current Quantum StorNext tape archive system, hereinafter referred to as "Old Ranch", to a new Versity hierarchical storage management software and Spectra Logic tape archive system, now to be referred to as "New Ranch".

Project Spaces

Project spaces on New Ranch are located at /scoutfs/projects/yourProjectName and contain the same pointer to OldRanchData as personal accounts. Data migration instructions for Project spaces and personal accounts are identical.

Curating your data

Data on Old Ranch will be accessible through November, 2026. This time span allows PIs and their delegates ample time to curate and migrate their data from Old Ranch to New Ranch. Now is the time to re-evaluate your archived data on Old Ranch e.g. decide if the data is still valuable and worth of long-term storage, or if the data is redundant or no longer needed.

If you only need access to your data in the short term (within the next year), then the data can stay on Old Ranch, and be accessed via the OldRanchData directory/NFS mount until November, 2026.

Examining Usage on Old Ranch

To see your total disk usage on Old Ranch, check the last entry in the "HSM_usage" text file in your Old Ranch home or project directory.

[slindsey@login1-ranch ~]$ ls -l
total 4
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root     root     30 Sep 17 14:05 OldRanchData -> /qranch/users/01158/slindsey/
[slindsey@login1-ranch ~]$ ls -l OldRanchData/
total 456
-rw------- 1 slindsey G-40300 995166818 Oct 12  2022 bigfile
-rw-r--r-- 1 root     root       455384 Oct 20 04:35 HSM_usage
[slindsey@login1-ranch ~]$ tail -1 OldRanchData/HSM_usage
Mon Oct 20 04:30:24 2025 /stornext/ranch_01/ranch/users/01158/slindsey total storage allocated: 2.0T on-disk in use: 484K (Under) total files allocated: 50K in use: 12 (Under) on-tape in use: 995.2 MB
[slindsey@login1-ranch ~]$

Examining Usage on New Ranch

Unlike Old Ranch, you can employ the standard du command to examine disk usage:

$ du
$ du -sh .  # display total disk usage in "human-readable" format
$ man du    # display man page 

Important Dates

Data Migration Directions

Since Old Ranch is a read-only file system, you must copy, not move, your data over to its new destination.

1. Terminal applications: You may use either the cp and/or the rsync UNIX commands to copy over your data.
2. Globus Online - the new Ranch3 endpoint points to New Ranch.

Transfer speeds via either method are equivalent.

ranch$ pwd
/home/02945/davec
ranch$ ls
OldRanchData
ranch$ cp OldRanchData/mystuff.tar .

ranch$ rsync -avhP OldRanchData/mystuff.tar .

Large Data Migrations Guidelines

Users or groups that have petabytes of data to be migrated can expect the process to take weeks to months, due to 1) the size of the datasets and 2) constant network traffic as many groups are also migrating data at this time. To put the overall time into perspective, to transfer 9 PB from Old Ranch to New Ranch could take a good three months, barring any interruptions.

It's important to not overload the system, and avoid severe contention with other users. When transferring large amounts of data, please follow these guidelines.

• Optimize your transfers by reducing the total quantity of files transferred as much as possible. Bundle your data into 10-100TB tarballs and migrate only after each successful transfer.

• Limit parallelizing transfers to no more than three simultaneous transfers at one time. If in doubt, one thread of copy may give a good estimate before submitting three copies.

Ranch Quotas and Polices

Ranch quotas and policies will remain constant across the new and old system.

See the Ranch User Guide for more about Ranch's "Project" Storage, a special directory structure designed to support both shared and oversized data directories for users or projects whose storage needs exceed the standard 2TB quota.