Learn about Edit and Playground mode, and how these modes affect where your files are stored when running a notebook analysis.
Why are there different Persistent Disk directories?
To help collaborators avoid overwriting each other's work, Terra locks a notebook when it is in use by another user. If the first user is running a notebook in Edit mode, subsequent users can only run in Playground mode, where they can execute code in the notebook, but cannot save changes back to the workspace.
To learn more about these two notebook modes, see "Edit" and "Playground" modes.
Notebook directories: Edit versus playground
Terra stores generated data in different directories depending on whether you are in edit or playground mode.
All data files and subfolders are located in /home/jupyter/ (or /home/jupyter-user/ for older notebooks). From there, you can navigate into the workspace directory, where you will see the edit and safe directories for storing data in edit and playground mode, respectively.
Example terminal command showing file directory
jupyter@697c984f8099:~/Terra-Notebooks-Quickstart_demo$ ls
edit safe
Old notebook file directories
Before September 2019, generated files were located in home/jupyter-user/notebooks/. If you have data in a PD generated prior to September 2019, file paths inside your notebooks pointing to local data files may need to be updated accordingly.
Example
If a datafile previously lived in the notebooks directory, it looked like this:
/home/jupyter-user/notebooks/datafile.txt
In the current directory structure, it becomes
Edit mode
/home/jupyter/[workspace-namer]/edit/datafile.txt
Playground mode
/home/jupyter/[workspace-namer]/play/datafile.txt