Sending Files to and from Amarel

Let’s assume you’re logged-in to a local workstation or laptop and not connected to Amarel. To send files from your local system to your Amarel /home directory,

scp file-1.txt file-2.txt <NetID>@amarel.rutgers.edu:/home/<NetID>

To pull a file from your Amarel /home directory to your laptop (note the “.” at the end of this command),

scp <NetID>@amarel.rutgers.edu:/home/<NetID>/file-1.txt .

If you want to copy an entire directory and its contents using scp, you’ll need to “package” your directory into a single, compressed file before moving it:

tar -czf my-directory.tar.gz my-directory

After moving it, you can unpack that .tar.gz file to get your original directory and contents:

tar -xzf my-directory.tar.gz

A handy way to synchronize a local file or entire directory between your local workstation and the Amarel cluster is to use the rsync utility. First, let’s sync a local (recently updated) directory with the same directory stored on Amarel:

rsync -trlvpz work-dir gc563@amarel.rutgers.edu:/home/gc563/work-dir

In this example, the rsync options I’m using are:

  • t (preserve modification times)
  • r (recursive, sync all subdirectories)
  • l (preserve symbolic links)
  • v (verbose, show all details)
  • p (preserve permissions)
  • z (compress transferred data)

To sync a local directory with updated data from Amarel:

rsync -trlvpz <your NetID>@amarel.rutgers.edu:/home/<your NetID>/work-dir work-dir

Here, we’ve simply reversed the order of the local and remote locations.

For added security, you can use SSH for the data transfer by adding the e option followed by the protocol name (SSH, in this case):

rsync -trlvpze ssh <your NetID>@amarel.rutgers.edu:/home/<your NetID>/work-dir work-dir

Transferring Files to and from Amarel