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Using USB drives

Pioreactor can use an attached USB drive for offline software updates, plugin installs, and large data exports.

Supported drives​

Use a USB drive formatted as exfat, vfat / FAT32, or ext4. Pioreactor mounts supported removable drives under /run/pioreactor/usb/.

In the Pioreactor UI, open Inventory and find the USB drive card. If a supported drive is detected, click Mount. You can also mount and eject the drive directly from Plugins. After you are finished, click Eject before removing the drive.

Leader page USB drive card showing a mounted USB drive

Files Pioreactor looks for​

Pioreactor scans the mounted USB drive for known artifacts:

  • Software update archives named like release_26.5.0.zip at the root of the drive.
  • Plugin wheel files ending in .whl at the root of the drive or in pioreactor/plugins/.

Exports saved to USB are written to:

pioreactor/exports/

Update software from USB​

  1. On another computer, download the Pioreactor release archive from the Updating the Pioreactor software page.
  2. Copy the release_*.zip file to the root of the USB drive.
  3. Attach the drive to the leader Pioreactor and mount it from the USB drive card.
  4. Open Updates, select Update from USB, choose the archive, choose the Pioreactors to update, and click Update.

Updates page showing the Update from USB option

Official release archives include a signed manifest. Pioreactor verifies the archive before running update scripts.

Install plugins from USB​

  1. On another computer, download the plugin's .whl file from PyPI or from the plugin author.
  2. Copy the .whl file to the USB drive root, or to pioreactor/plugins/.
  3. Attach the drive to the leader, open Plugins, and click Mount if needed.
  4. Plugins found on the mounted USB drive appear above the usual plugin list. Read-only drives are supported for plugin installation.
  5. Choose a target Pioreactor or the cluster target, then click Install.

Plugins page showing plugins found on a USB drive

For worker installs, the leader copies the wheel to the worker and installs it from the staged file.

Export data to USB​

  1. Attach and mount a writable USB drive on the leader.
  2. Open Export data.
  3. Select the experiment, datasets, and date range.
  4. Choose Export to USB and start the export.

Export data page showing Export to USB

Large exports can take a while. Keep the page open until the export finishes.

Command line​

You can also manage USB drives over SSH:

pio usb list
pio usb mount
pio usb scan
pio usb path
pio usb eject

If more than one removable partition is detected, pass the device explicitly:

pio usb mount --device /dev/sda1
pio usb eject --device /dev/sda1