Each workspace within our Trusted Research Environment (TRE) is provisioned with several shared directories. These are often referred to as your study data and project folder, and are linked to your workspace at the time of creation. For each project, your account also has a unique user folder. Once your workspace has been created, there is no way to link the workspace to additional studies, or to a new project - this is to ensure datasets are not shared between projects.
On an Ubuntu Linux workspace, these folders are mounted under the “studies” folder of your home directory. Windows workspaces provide these folders on the D:\ drive.
There are some known issues with using SPSS from the D:\ drive. We would recommend storing files on your workspace’s C:\ drive (e.g. on your Desktop or Documents folder) and copying the files to the project storage at the end of your session.
👩⚕️ User folder
Your user folder is unique to a project - if you are using the TRE for multiple projects, this folder will be different depending on the projects' workspace you are logged into. It can only be accessed by yourself and is a place for you to store scripts, configuration, etc. The user folder has been described as the unmentionably named folder due to its randomly generated name. However, this will always be prefixed with “u-" (for user) which should help you identify it.
👬 Project Folder
The project folder is your collaborative space - you can use this to exchange files between other users on the same project. The exact name of this project can be found from your workspace details (see the image on the right).
Note that syncing will not be immediate - it may take several minutes before a file shows up on another workspace after being copied to the project storage. For this reason, it is not recommended to use this folder for live editing if you know someone else on the project also needs to edit the same files.
📚 Study Folder
The study folders are provided to a workspace in read-only mode.
Data released by HIC will be sitting in this folder. This is to ensure that study datasets have not been modified, which may lead to errors while computing statistics about a cohort. Generally we aim to do each data release as a separate study. A workspace can be linked to multiple studies, each appearing as a separate directory within your workspace.
🐧 Notes specific to Ubuntu workspaces
To improve performance of the S3 mounts, caching is used on both Ubuntu and Windows. On Ubuntu workspaces, it may occasionally be necessary to invalidate this cache to avoid waiting for it to time out. You can do this by running mount_s3.sh from a Terminal window.