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Automated Cleanup of Scratch

The scratch space is automatically cleaned up nightly with the following mechanism.

  1. Create daily snapshots of the scratch folder and retain for 3 days.
  2. Remove files which were not modified for the last 14 days.
  3. Remove folders which were not modified for the last 14 days and are empty.
  4. Erroneously deleted files can be manually retrieved from the snapshots.

Info

If you want to prevent a folder from being removed, place an empty .keepdir file inside of it. This will protect only the folder, not its content!

$ touch ~/scratch/tmp/.keepdir

There are also exception rules in place for the .cache folder many users symlink to scratch.

Warning

We specifically use the mtime attribute to determine if files in scratch should be cleaned up. Copying or downloading files to scratch while preserving the original mtime might lead to unexpected results.