Box.com bulk transfer

UAB has an Enterprise contract with Box.com, which is currently in BETA.

This page describes what we have learned about doing bulk-transfers of data.

Warning: size limitations

Box.com claims to have a 5G max filesize limit.

There was a rumor this would be increased in early 2016. Offically, this is all we know: https://community.box.com/t5/Managing-Your-Content/What-s-the-maximum-file-size-I-can-upload/ta-p/307

If you need to work around this, you can use the Linux "split" utility

# chop file into 4G pieces split \ --bytes=4000m \ big_file.fastq.gz \ big_file.fastq.gz.split4g.

# record checksums of original and chunks md5sum \ big_file.fastq.gz \ big_file.fastq.gz.split4g.* \ > big_file.fastq.gz.md5

Warning: time stamps

When using an FTP client to transfer data up, it is easy to lose both modification and creation timestamps. In particular, many clients will (optionally) preserve modification time, but few will (optionally) preserve creation date.

FTP client	platform	modification	creation
SmartFTP	GUI/Win Only/$$	yes	can be enabled
lftp	cmd_line/linux/free	yes	no
fileZilla	GUI/linux+win/free	can be enabled	no
ftp_ssl	cmd_line/linux/free	yes	no

Filezilla on create times

request closed, no plans to fix: https://trac.filezilla-project.org/ticket/2347

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