# Data management

## Share data files with your users

Sometimes you might need to distribute a set of files to all
your users, so they don't have to re-download it once per person.
This is particularly useful in educational contexts, where you might
be teaching a course that reads a common dataset.

```{warning}
If you are teaching with large datasets, you might run out of
memory! So consider teaching with just a subset of data before
distributing large datasets to your users.
```

## The `shared` directory

There are two folders that are used together to allow Administrators to
share data files with all users.

`shared`
: All users have a directory called `shared` in their home directory.
  This is a *readonly* directory - users and administrators can not write to it.
  However, anybody can *access* and *read from* the `shared` directory.
  This is how a user accesses a data file distributed by a hub administrator.

`shared-readwrite`
: **(administrators only)** Admin users also have a directory called `shared-readwrite` in their home directory.
  This is the *same folder* as the `shared` directory, but writeable!
  Any files admins put here will be immediately visible in all users' `shared` directories.

## A workflow for sharing datasets

To share datasets with users, admins should put the dataset in
`~/shared-readwrite`. If they are distributing notebook / content
that *reads* this dataset, it should refer to files in `~/shared/`
rather than in `~/shared-readwrite`. This will prevent accidental
erasures / writes on behalf of admins.

```{warning}
This is an experimental feature, and the names of these directories
and their structure are subject to change.
```