Preparing to archive

We suggest to compress and annotate data prior to archiving with the TSM archive:

• compressing saves transfer time
• annotation eases the interpretation of retrieved data (if an archive needs to be pulled back).

Smaller directory can be compressed in the standard way:

# assuming gzip compression
$ tar -czf <archivename>.tar.gz <directoryname>

For directory with many huge files, this will take some patience - yours and others on the login-node where you are working on. An alternative is to reserve a full node and use parallel compression (again assuming gzip, just using the parallel version of it):

$ module load tools/pigz
# an interactive job might look like:
$ srun -A <your account> -p parallel -C broadwell -t <appropriate time> -N 1 -c40 --pty bash -i 
<some node>:$ tar -I pigz -cf <archivename>.tar.gz <directoryname>