About Download Links

Once files have been added to this repository, the files you see on GitHub or when the repository is cloned will be LFS pointer files .

A question is, how do you specify a download link to the actual data files?

A quick note about cloning and git lfs pull

First, anyone cloning the repo will get only LFS pointer files and not the actual data files. To get to the actual data files in a cloned repository, a git lfs pull operation is needed. But, BE CAREFUL!! An unqualified git lfs pull operation downloads every LFS file in the repo which could take hours. If you are interested in only specific files, use the --include option to git lfs pull to identify the specific file(s) you want to fully download.

Links to download specific files

When writing emails or documentation which includes links to files to be downloaded, cloning and git lfs is not used. Instead, we we provide HTTPs access to those files through the website that is hosted from this repository using GitHub magic URL to access their raw contents.

The download path for aneurysm_tutorial_data.tar.gz (not the LFS pointer file), for example, will look something like…

https://github.com/visit-dav/largedata/blob/master/bindata/aneurysm_tutorial_data.tar.gz?raw=true

You can use this link anywhere including in email to give users the link to get that specific data file. Users do not require a GitHub account in order to access data through this link.

Better still, give them a link to the landing page for the file. For the aneurysm data, it will look something like…

https://visit-dav.github.io/largedata/datarchives/aneurysm

The last entry in the URL, aneurysm in this example, is whatever the name of the markdown file hosting information about the data is without the extension.

The landing page link takes users to a page with more information about the file including maybe images as well as all the download format options (e.g. .tar.xz, .tar.gz, .zip, etc.) and their integrity checks.