Transferring Files to and from Oscar
There are several ways to move files between your machine and Oscar. Which method you choose will depend on how much data you need to move and your personal preference for each method.
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
You can drag and drop files from your machine to the Oscar filesystem via SMB. This is an easy method for a small number of files. Please refer to this page for mounting filesystem via SMB.
Mac and Linux
SCP
You can use
scp
to transfer files. For example to copy a file from your computer to Oscar:scp /path/to/source/file <username>@ssh.ccv.brown.edu:/path/to/destination/file
To copy a file from Oscar to your computer:
scp <username>@ssh.ccv.brown.edu:/path/to/source/file /path/to/destination/file
RSYNC
You can use
rsync
to sync files across your local computer to Oscar:rsync -azvp --progress path/to/source/directory <username>@ssh.ccv.brown.edu:/path/to/destination/directory
Windows On Windows, if you have PuTTY installed, you can use it's
pscp
function from the terminal.- DUO is required if you are not connected to approved networks, e.g., home network
- There is no interactive terminal message but your Phone will get a prompt automatically
- DUO is NOT required if you are connected to approved Brown networks
- A personal Windows computer must have CrowdStrike installed in order to be on approved Brown networks.
In general, you can specify the following for your GUI programs:
- Protocol: SFTP
- Host: transfer.ccv.brown.edu
- User: your Oscar username
- Password: your Brown password
Click the
Options
and then Preferences
menu in WinsCP. In the poped up window, click Transfer
and then Background
to (Figure 1)- change
Maximal number of transfers at the same time
to 1 - uncheck
Use multiple connections for single transfer

Figure 1 WinSCP Maximal Transfers
click
Endurace
to (Figure 2)- set
Automatically reconnect session
to 5 seconds - uncheck Automatically reconnect session, if it stalls
- set
Keep reconnection for
to 10 seconds

Figure 2 WinSCP Reconnect

Figure 3 WinSCP Session Creation
Click the
Edit
menu and then select the Settings
submenu, and then change the Timeout in seconds
to 0 to disable, as shown in Figure 2
Figure 4 Disable Timeout
Open the Site Manager as show in Figure 5.

Figure 5 Open Site Manager
Click the 'New Site' button to add a new site, as shown in Figure 4:

Figure 6 New Site
Limit the number of simultaneous connections to 1, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 7 Limit Simultaneous Connections
Click the 'Connect' button to connect to Oscar and transfer files.

Figure 8 Cyberduck Connection
You may see a popup window on 'Unknown Fingerprint'. You just need to check the 'Always' option and click 'Allow'. This is windows should not pop up again unless the transfer server is changed again.

Figure 9 Unknown Fingerprint
Globus is a secure, reliable research data management service. You can move data directly to Oscar from anothe Globus endpoint. Oscar has one Globus endpoint:
BrownU_CCV_Oscar
If you want to use Globus Online to move data to/from you own machine, you can install Globus Connect Personal. For more instructions on how to use Globus, see the Oscar section in the Globus documentation.
LFTP is a sophisticated file transfer program supporting a number of network protocols (ftp, http, sftp, fish, torrent). It has bookmarks, a built-in mirror command, can transfer several files in parallel and was designed with reliability in mind. You can use the
LFTP
module from Oscar to transfer data from any (S)FTP server you have access to directly to Oscar. Below are the main LFTP
commands to get you started:module load lftp # To load the LFTP module from Oscar
lftp -u login,passwd MyAwesomeUrl # To connect to your (S)FTP server
ls # To list files on the (S)FTP server
!ls # To list files in your directory on Oscar
get MyAwesomeFile # To download a single file
mirror # To download everything as is from the server
mirror --directory=/name_of_directory/ # To download a specific directory