Files & storage

Understanding where your files live is important: some locations persist across workspaces, some persist only within one workspace, and some are temporary.

/work - your persistent work directory

Every workspace mounts ~/work from the host as /work inside the container.

• Files written to /work persist across all your workspaces and survive stops, restarts, and even workspace deletion.
• A different workspace you create later sees the same /work.
• Put datasets, checkpoints, code, and anything you can’t afford to lose here.

/home/<you> - per-workspace home

Your home directory inside the container is backed by a per-workspace directory on the host (~/workspaces/<id>/workspace-private). This means:

• conda environments, pip user-installs, dotfiles, and shell history persist across stop and start of that workspace.
• When you create a new workspace, the home directory starts fresh - the environments and installs from an old workspace don’t carry over.
• When you delete a workspace, its per-workspace home is archived under your account. Ask your admin if you need to recover something from it. Your /work is not removed.

If you want to preserve a conda environment across workspaces, keep it under /work or export and reinstall it.

Shared mounts

Your admin may have configured shared directories - datasets, pre-downloaded model weights - that appear at fixed paths like /data inside every workspace. These are read-only by default. Ask your admin what paths are available.

File ownership

Workspaces run as your Linux user with --userns=keep-id. Files you create inside the container appear as your Linux user on the host - no chown required, and no UID mismatch when you access them outside LabPod (e.g. over SSH).

File manager

Files is one of the two primary destinations in the top navigation (alongside Workspaces), and the workspace detail page also has its own Files shortcut next to the main app - both open the same server-side file manager, pre-scoped to that workspace when you came from its detail page. From there you can:

• Browse your /work and per-workspace home directories.
• Upload files from your local machine.
• Download individual files or entire directories as a .tar.gz archive - useful for backing up a workspace home before deleting, or for extracting results.
• Create directories and rename or delete files.

The file manager works even when the workspace is stopped.

Hugging Face model cache

LabPod sets HF_HOME=/work/.hf-cache inside every workspace. This means model weights and datasets you download with transformers, datasets, or huggingface-hub are stored once per user under your /work and are automatically shared across all your workspaces - instead of downloading 16+ GB again every time you create a new workspace.

If you want a different cache location, override HF_HOME from Manage workspace → Settings → Environment. If your lab shares common weights, ask your admin to configure a shared read-only mount and point HF_HUB_CACHE at it.