Ranch

Ranch is a long-term tape archive consisting of a 4 PB Dell flash front end and a 16 PB Dell ECS disk tier backed by two 15-frame Spectra Logic TFinity libraries with 20 LTO-9 tape drives, running Versity ScoutAM on the ScoutFS filesystem. It is particularly well suited for finished data that must be kept for years but is rarely read, and is often used for completed simulation output, raw instrument data and results moved off TACC compute systems at the end of a project. It includes no user software - Ranch stores data rather than running it, and pairs with the TACC compute resources whose allocations it accompanies.

Get Support

GET AN ACCOUNT ON RANCH

TACC Accounts - create your TACC account

Storage Documentation

Ranch has two spaces: a personal archive of 2 TB and 50,000 files for every user, and a shared Project space that a team requests through a TACC support ticket when the standard per-user quota is not enough. Data lands on a flash disk cache and is migrated to tape, so a read may have to wait while the file is fetched back from a cartridge.

File count matters as much as capacity - bundle small files into one tar archive before you transfer them. See [Ranch Organizing Your Data].

Ranch holds one copy of your data. TACC states that Ranch is a single-copy archival system whose user data is neither backed up nor replicated, and that it is never to be used as a replication solution or for system backups. Keep a second copy elsewhere of anything you cannot lose.

Data archived before the 2025 hardware replacement is not moved for you: copy it across yourself before the end of November 2026 - see [Ranch Migration 2026].

File System Documentation

Directory Path Quota Purge Backup Notes
Home $HOME 2 TB, 50,000 files Not backed up Every user gets this space automatically. Check space used with du -sh and file count with find . -type f | wc -l.
Project /scoutfs/projects/<project-name> See notes Not backed up Shared or over-size space for a team, requested with a TACC support ticket when the standard 2 TB per user is not enough. Capacity is set per request.

External Storage Documentation

Ranch is the archive tier for TACC's computational systems. You need an allocation on a TACC compute resource such as Frontera, Stampede3 or Lonestar6 to hold a Ranch allocation, and ACCESS PIs are prompted for the companion storage allocation during proposal submission.

Ranch filesystems cannot be mounted on another system, and Ranch cannot be reached from inside a running job - transfer data from Ranch to your compute resource before the job starts. See [Ranch Accessing Files from Within Running Programs]. In scripts, use TACC's $ARCHIVER for the archive hostname and $ARCHIVE for your personal archive space, so the script survives a hardware change.

File Transfer Documentation

Ranch has no separate data transfer node - transfers go directly to and from ranch.tacc.utexas.edu. Use scp for most transfers, and Globus for very large datasets.

Bundle small files into a single tar archive before you transfer, and send as few and as large files as you can. TACC supports rsync against Ranch but advises avoiding it wherever possible, so it is not listed as a method below.

See [Ranch Data Transfer Methods].

Supported Methods Data Transfer Node / Globus Collection Notes
SCP | RECOMMENDED ranch.tacc.utexas.edu Secure Copy with scp Command
GLOBUS Globus Data Transfer Guide at TACC