There are a variety of options for storing large-scale research data at UVa. Public and Internal Use data storage systems can be accessed from the Rivanna high performance computing system.

Storage Directories

Name Quota Price Data Protection Accessible from Best Practices
/home 50GB Free 1-week snapshots Rivanna /home is best used as a working directory when using Rivanna interactively. Slurm jobs run against /home will be slower than those run against /scratch. The /home directory is a personal storage space that is not shareable with other users.
/scratch 10TB Free No backups, Data removed 90 days after last file access time Rivanna /scratch is a high performance parallel filesystem that is suitable for large scale computational work. Data should be moved from /scratch for long-term storage. The /scratch directory is for personal use and not shared with other users.

Scratch Cleanup Policy

Rivanna’s scratch file system has a limit of 10TB per user. This policy is in place to guarantee the stability and performance of the scratch file system. Scratch is intended as a temporary work directory. It is not backed up and files that have not been accessed for more than 90 days are marked for deletion. Users are encouraged to back up their important data. Home directories and leased storage are not subject to this policy.


Request Additional Storage

Researchers can lease additional storage, Research Standard or Research Project storage, for sharing public or internal use data within a research group. Research Standard and Research Project storage volumes are mounted on Rivanna and can also be accessed from local workstations. Learn more about our storage offerings.

Storage requests can be placed through this form: