UPDATE Oct 22, 2019: We were able to simplify how users need to change the file paths in notebooks that point to local data files. Therefore, the article below differs slightly from the email notification you may have received on October 18,2019. 

To help collaborators avoid overwriting each other's work in a notebook, we’re releasing new functionality that locks a notebook when it is in use by another user. At the same time, we’re adding a 'playground mode' that lets users run and explore the notebook - without saving changes back to the workspace or taking the lock. To learn more about these convenient notebook editing modes, see this article.

This may require a minor action on your part to fix file paths inside your notebook that point to local files!

To accommodate the updates highlighted above, we've changed the directory where notebooks and notebook data are stored on the virtual machine.

Specifically all data files and sub-folders were moved from the home directory:

/home/jupyter-user

to:

/home/jupyter-user/notebooks/

Therefore file paths inside your notebooks pointing to local data files will need to be updated accordingly.

Example

If a datafile previously lived in the home directory it looked like this:

/home/jupyter-user/datafile.txt

With the new changes to the directory structure it becomes:

/home/jupyter-user/notebooks/datafile.txt