The All of Us Research Hub operates in a fully cloud-based environment, where users manage data storage and handle related costs entirely online. All file storage, analysis, and billing options are accessible through the platform, with no offline options available.

Storage in the Standard Environment

The All of Us Researcher Workbench offers several storage options within its environments:

Workspace Bucket: a cloud storage area that stores analysis-specific files unique to each workspace.

• Storage: You must manually save important files outputted from notebooks to the bucket using code snippets before terminating the environment. From there you can call files from the bucket into any notebook within the workspace.

• Workspace Sharing: If you share a workspace with others, they will also have access to the shared workspace bucket.

• Deletion: Deleting a workspace will also delete the associated workspace bucket, and all the data stored in it.

• Costs: $0.026/GB per month

Open

Persistent Disk: personal storage to transfer code, outputs, etc. across different workspaces

• Reattachable: The persistent disk remains available even after the compute environment or workspace is deleted, and can be re-attached when you recreate the cloud environment.

• Personal Storage: Only you have access to this storage; it is not shared with collaborators.

• Downloading: Results and figures can be locally downloaded from the persistent disk only.

• Two Disk Types: Choose between a standard persistent disk or a solid-state drive (SSD) for faster performance (learn more here).

• Costs: $0.04/GB per month

More Information:

• Notebook Tutorial: Backup Notebook

• User Support: Storage Options

  • Workspace Buckets

    • Accessing Files in the Bucket

    • Copy Data to and from your Workspace Bucket

  • Managing a Persistent Disk

Credits and Billing

All of Us provides researchers with $300 of initial credits to start your project. This pays for application usage and storage fees. If you need to spend beyond your initial credits, create a billing account with Google Cloud Platform (GCP), which you can also use to monitor your computational costs.

Learn More:

• Relevant User Support Hub Pages

• User Support: Enabling and Disabling a GCP account

• User Support: More Information about costs

• User Support: Overview of Billing and Setting up a Billing Account

• AoU Office Hours: Cloud Environments and Storage Costs