Question about accessing the archived Mobiperf dataset

[Tauhidun Nabi, Syed]

Hi M-Lab folks,

Apologies for the weekend email.

My name is Tauhid, and I’m a PhD student at Virginia Tech interested in using the historical Mobiperf dataset for my research project.

I’ve run into some difficulty accessing the data through the gs://archive-measurement-lab/mobiperf/ bucket. Specifically, I can download individual files from the web interface without any issues, but when I try to download multiple files using the recommended gsutil/command-line tool, the process fails with a billing-related error:

            AccessDeniedException: 403 ... content <The billing account for the owning project is disabled in state closed>

This error seems to prevent bulk downloads, which are essential for large-scale analysis. I wanted to check whether this is a known issue and if there are any recommended workarounds for researchers needing access to the dataset in bulk.

I greatly appreciate any guidance you can provide—and thank you for maintaining this valuable public resource.

Best Regards,

Tauhid Nabi

PhD Student, Dept. of Computer Science

Virginia Tech

Portfolio | LinkedIn

[Nathan Kinkade]

Hi Tauhid,

The billing account for the "measurement-lab" GCP project is not disabled or closed, so I'm unsure why you might be receiving that error. Could you share the exact command you are using? The entire bucket gs://archive-measurement-lab/mobiperf/ has around 2GiB of files, comprising around 17k files. When I run the following command, I don't appear to get any errors, though I did kill the process after it had downloaded around 700 files:

$ gsutil -m cp -r gs://archive-measurement-lab/mobiperf ./

Best,

Nathan

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[Matt Mathis]

Older MLab archives have been moved to "nearline-storage" or "coldline-storage", where they are cheaper to keep, but much more expensive to access.    Although I would expect a more informative message it might mean "You don't have billing permission to do a bulk restore'.

What dates are you looking for?   How much data?

Thanks,

--MM--
Evil is defined by mortals who think they know "The Truth" and use force to apply it to others. 
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Matt Mathis  (Email is best)

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[Tauhidun Nabi, Syed]

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the clarification — that makes perfect sense now. I had already followed up with Nathan one-on-one and was able to get the full MobiPerf dataset I needed, so I’m all set. I had originally been following the instructions from the MobiPerf for researchers page (https://mobiperf.com/for-researchers), which may be a bit out of date and was probably the source of my confusion.

I really appreciate the context about nearline/coldline storage — that explains the odd error message I saw.

Best,

Tauhid Nabi

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From: Matt Mathis <matt....@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, September 3, 2025 9:56 PM
To: Tauhidun Nabi, Syed <tauh...@vt.edu>
Cc: Nathan Kinkade <kin...@measurementlab.net>; dis...@measurementlab.net <dis...@measurementlab.net>
Subject: Re: [M-Lab-Discuss] Question about accessing the archived Mobiperf dataset