# Where your files live

Three places, and the difference between them is what survives what.

## Your home folder

Where you land when you open a terminal: documents, projects, code, configuration, the things a program writes without being told where.

The workspace has one, and so does each machine you attach. Neither has a size to choose. It grows when it fills, and what is on it is what you pay for, at $0.15 per GB a month — nothing to provision, nothing to resize, nothing to guess before you have used anything. Delete a few gigabytes and the bill follows the next hour.

You can check what you are paying for with `df -h ~` on the workspace or the machine: the `Used` column is the figure, and it is the same one the invoice reads.

The workspace's home folder is also the one the Hinode application puts in the file manager on a Mac or a Windows PC, so you can drag files in and out without opening a terminal. It is there while the workspace is running.

Keeping the home folder local is deliberate: a home folder shared over a network makes every program that touches many small files crawl, and the programs you use touch thousands of them — a Python environment, a git repository, an editor's index. Local is what makes them behave like they do on a laptop.

Both survive a pause. A machine's home folder goes when the machine goes; the workspace's goes only when the workspace does.

## The shared folder

One folder for the whole workspace, and the workspace and every machine in it see the same one. This is where models, datasets and finished output belong.

It has no size to choose either. You write to it, and what is in it is what you pay for, at $0.10 per GB a month. A machine you attach tomorrow already has your models, because they were never on a machine in the first place.

It reads large files quickly, and reads them from several machines at once. It is a poor place to build a Python environment or check out a repository — put those in your home folder, and keep the big, finished things here.

Models you download from Hugging Face land here without you doing anything: `HF_HOME` points at `~/shared/.cache/huggingface` on the workspace and on every machine. So a model is downloaded once for the whole workspace and billed at the shared folder's $0.10 per GB a month. To keep a model on one machine instead, set `HF_HOME` yourself; yours wins.

The shared folder is not on any machine, so deleting a machine does not touch it.

## What is installed

When you attach a machine, it starts from a snapshot of your workspace: the programs you installed there and the settings you changed. So a new machine is your machine, not a blank one.

That snapshot is taken when you ask for it, from the workspace, and you can keep several. A machine that is already running is not changed underneath you — it keeps the version it started with, and picks up a newer one the next time it starts.

## Which region your files are in

All three are in the region your workspace was created in: the United States (`us-east-1`) or Europe (`eu-central-1`), whichever answered your computer faster at the time. A workspace does not move between regions, so that is where your files stay.

## What survives what

| | Pause the workspace or a machine | Delete the machine | Delete the workspace |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Home folder on the workspace | kept | kept | gone |
| Home folder on a machine | kept | gone | gone |
| The shared folder | kept | kept | gone |
| What you installed on the workspace | kept | kept | gone |

Deleting a workspace ends everything in it, including the address it answered at, and the address does not come back. That is why deleting one asks you to type its name.