Datashare

Overview

It's a common use case that you need to share files as part of your research. To make this simple, we provide an easy mechanism for putting data onto the internet: this is called datashare and has two components:

Folder /datashare/ which you can find in each secure collaboration project that any project member can write to.
Website https://datashare.molbiol.ox.ac.uk - all data stored in /datashare/ is publicly available via this web server.

Important

The datashare system has no guarantees of security whatsoever and that the data is available to the entire internet at all times. As such, you must not use it to share data which has any restrictions on who may have access. We regret that, at this time we do not have a service which will allow you to securely share data with other people without access to our systems.

Additionally, please note that the datashare service is not a web publishing service. While it is possible to place any data you wish in this folder, including HTML data or reference data, we do not guarantee the long term availablily of the data nor do we guarantee that the URL will be maintained at its current location. Do not use datashare for long term sharing of data and do not include datashare URLs in publications.

How to use datashare

Decide which collaboration project you want your data associated with. For this example, I'll use sysadmin.
If you don't have one already, create a directory in the project's datashare directory for your data.
```
mkdir /project/sysadmin/datashare/dtooke
```
Copy your data into it. Please note that you cannot use symlinks to point to other storage locations on the cluster. For example:
```
cp /project/sysadmin/dtooke/files.tar /project/sysadmin/datashare/dtooke/
```
Your data will appear at https://datashare.molbiol.ox.ac.uk/public/project/PROJECTNAME/FOLDERNAME/FILENAME. For example, the file copied above could be accessed via https://datashare.molbiol.ox.ac.uk/public/project/sysadmin/dtooke/files.tar.
Ensure files inside datashare folder have relaxed permissions: other=read. This is usually the case, but if not then will cause error 403 Forbidden.
```
$ ls -l $file
-rw-r----- ...
#      ^ missing other=read here

$ chmod o=r $file
-rw-r--r-- ...
```

Please note

URL format does not contain word datashare/ after https://datashare.molbiol.ox.ac.uk/public/project/.
datashare is not a file browser - you must specify the full path. To transfer multiple files it may be more convenient to create a tar archive and put the tar in datashare.
It not possible to customise web server configuration using htaccess files; if you require advanced features please contact us.

Backwards compatibility

For backwards compatibility purposes, the web address userweb.molbiol.ox.ac.uk is redirected to point to datashare.molbiol.ox.ac.uk