HydroShare (CUAHSI)

www.hydroshare.orgResearch data repositorystorage/hydroshareJSON compare report an error provider JSON

Free allowance: 20 GB automatic on account creation, with an increase process that is explicitly designed to succeed: 'if needed, request reasonable quota increase … all reasonable requests will be approved subject to system capacity limitations'.
Verdict: fails: quotathe free allowance is too small to matter
Cost: free tier
Identity: emailno card, no phone
Binding limit: write-gatedapproved subject to system capacity limitations'; reviewed' but are a manual queue
Evidence: reported5 sources; a third party said so
Freshness: stale on 2026-11-05checked 2026-10-21 (inherited); stale on 2026-11-05

Free tier	20 GB automatic on account creation, with an increase process that is explicitly designed to succeed: 'if needed, request reasonable quota increase … all reasonable requests will be approved subject to system capacity limitations'. No absolute ceiling is published — the only stated limit is capacity. So the honest number is 20 GB default with an unbounded-by-documentation increase path, and any 500 GB+ claim depends on a human granting it. A second lever: on publish, the storage is transferred off the author's quota — 'CUAHSI will assume the burden of storage for published resources' — so publishing frees the quota for reuse. unit GB; metered on stored-bytes
Price	none stated
Limits	write-gated (binding) approved subject to system capacity limitations' source write-gated (binding) reviewed' but are a manual queue source write-gated on the increase (email a human), and the quota is small by default. Discipline mismatch: it is a hydrology repository, so non-hydrology payloads are off-genre even though nothing technically enforces it.
Identity	email email
Egress	Free and anonymous. Verified: the resource data endpoint serves a bagit zip to a logged-out client with no credentials.
Per-object cap	not stated
Retention	not stated
Interface	s3, rest rest
Tooling	There is also a documented external-storage mount feature that lets you register a resource whose bytes live in your own S3/iRODS instead of HydroShare — that is the interesting chaining primitive, because it makes HydroShare a metadata/DOI layer over storage you already have.
Composes with	Resources are unlimited; quota is per-user and transferable ('The quota holder … can be transferred between owner[s]'). Publishing moves the bytes off your quota onto CUAHSI's, then the freed 20 GB is reusable — so the pattern is publish-then-refill, repeated. Community/group resources can pool several members' quotas.
Reliability	US NSF-funded via CUAHSI; Increase requests are 'promptly reviewed' but are a manual queue.
Parsed numbers	has-free-tier 1

Evidence 5

date	source	what it proved
2026-10-21	help.hydroshare.org/about-hydroshare/policies/quota/	opened: 'The automatic quota allocation upon account creation is 20 gigabytes … request reasonable quota increase … all reasonable requests will be approved subject to system capacity limitations'; 'once a resource is published … CUAHSI will assume the burden of storage for published resources.'
2026-10-21	casrai.org/guides/cuahsi-hydroshare-hydrology-data-repositor	opened: 'Browsing and downloading public resources requires no account, and creating an account to upload, manage, and publish resources is also free.'
2026-10-21	www.hydroshare.org/hsapi/resource/?format=json	PROBED: curl -> HTTP 200, 137,978 bytes of JSON. Anonymous REST read works.
2026-10-21	www.hydroshare.org/hsapi/resource/999b9319ec304924b3f3113ad7	PROBED: curl -> HTTP 200, 211,663 bytes, body begins with the ZIP magic 'PK\x03\x04' and contains 999b9319…/bagit.txt. So the metadata endpoint returns a real bagit archive, not a stub — the object comes back.
2026-10-21	www.hydroshare.org/resource/999b9319ec304924b3f3113ad75ffc23	PROBED: curl -> 200 but content-type application/json, 143 bytes — this specific path is an API descriptor, not the bytes. Distinguishing the two endpoints matters: /hsapi/resource/<id>/?format=json is the one that yields the archive.

More fields 1

dead end {"failure_class": "quota","why": "20 GB automatic on account creation, with an increase process that is explicitly designed to succeed: 'if needed, request reasonable quota increase … all reasonable requests will be approved subject to system capacity limitations'. No absolute ceiling is published — the only stated limit is capacity. So the honest number is 20 GB default with an unbounded-by-documentation increase path, and any 500 GB+ claim depends on a human granting it. A second lever: on publish, the storage is transferred off the author's quota — 'CUAHSI will assume the burden of storage for published resources' — so publishing frees the quota for reuse.","retry_when": null,"first_recorded": "2026-10-21"}

dead end	{"failure_class": "quota","why": "20 GB automatic on account creation, with an increase process that is explicitly designed to succeed: 'if needed, request reasonable quota increase … all reasonable requests will be approved subject to system capacity limitations'. No absolute ceiling is published — the only stated limit is capacity. So the honest number is 20 GB default with an unbounded-by-documentation increase path, and any 500 GB+ claim depends on a human granting it. A second lever: on publish, the storage is transferred off the author's quota — 'CUAHSI will assume the burden of storage for published resources' — so publishing frees the quota for reuse.","retry_when": null,"first_recorded": "2026-10-21"}

Unknown values 4

per object cap notes: the field may be stated in a source that was not read
per object cap stated: the field may be stated in a source that was not read
retention notes: the field may be stated in a source that was not read
retention stated: the field may be stated in a source that was not read