Globus now supports recurring and scheduled transfers

January 29, 2021   |  Brigitte Raumann

We’re excited to announce that Globus now supports recurring and scheduled transfers. The new feature allows you to submit a job that will reliably request periodic transfers with a defined start time. For example, you can set up a daily, automatic sync to your back-up system or delay the start of a big transfer until midnight on Saturday or move data to archival storage once a week. Status of such scheduled jobs can be monitored and managed as well, and, unlike a cron job, your recurring transfers don’t depend on the availability of your system.

This is something the community has been requesting for a long time, so we’re particularly eager to get feedback on this capability from our users. We encourage you to try out the feature using the new command line client globus-timer-cli. Once you authenticate, all you need to do is submit a transfer command that defines your source and destination, the files you wish to transfer, and a time interval. Optionally, you can submit the list of files and directories you’d like to transfer as a CSV formatted file, set a delayed start time, sync files, or set other transfer options, such as encryption.

We plan to add options for this feature in the Globus webapp soon, along with additional features such as the ability to delete files and support High Assurance collections, prior to releasing this in production.

We welcome your feedback at support@globus.org.