Transfer data to and from lab machines

[Korin Richmond]

Sometimes you might want to transfer files from your own computer at home to the Appleton Tower PPLS lab machines, for example to transfer speech audio data you’ve recorded at home to the lab for building voice for the Speech Synthesis course assignment. Or indeed vice versa – if you want to copy a file on the lab machines to your home machine.

There are a number of ways to achieve this:

• Every student has 1TB storage on OneDrive. You can copy files onto your OneDrive space using your machine at home, and then copy them from OneDrive to your home directory on one of the lab machines (either a remote desktop or a physical machine in the lab). OneDrive has a web interface, so you can do this with any operating system, including linux in the lab. Leaving a copy of your data on OneDrive also acts as a spare backup copy!
• You can transfer files using either “scp” or “rsync” by connecting to scp1.ppls.ed.ac.uk. Linux and Mac machines typically have scp and rsync as command line utilities by default. GUIs are also available (e.g. Cyberduck) on Windows and others which can also use the SCP and RSYNC protocols
• You can mount your lab home directory on your own computer using a SAMBA mount by connecting to machine fs1.ppls.ed.ac.uk. Exactly how you do this depends on what operating system you use.

  For Macs, for example, from Finder just type “CMD-K” (or navigate to “Go->Connect to server…”), then enter “smb://fs1.ppls.ed.ac.uk” and follow the onscreen instructions. After entering your username and password (same as for the lab machines), you’ll be able to select your home directory and mount it.

  It then just becomes like any other folder on your home machine, except you are accessing it over the internet in the background (so note, if you have a slow connection, access will be slower!)

• For more advanced users, you can similarly mount your lab directory on your own machine using SSHFS, again connecting to scp1.ppls.ed.ac.uk.
• You can copy data on to a USB drive at home, then take it to the lab and plug it in there to copy it off again in

Hope that helps!

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