How do you access DVC remote storage to view the file content?

Question

I am very new to DVC and I encounter a few problems with remote storage. I stored my data into dvc remote storage here (.dvc/config file):

[core]
    remote = dvc-remote
['remote "dvc-remote"']
    url = /tmp/dvc-storage

Questions:

1. Where can I access it in my file explorer? Or is there any way to check for the content inside without dvc pull?

2. I first store a data name dataset into this remote storage, after I retrieve and deleted some pictures in the dataset and push it back into the storage, is my original dataset overwrite or dataset files are kept?

3. I only dvc add the dataset file into dvc remote, why is it that on Iterative Studio the path of my other files changed to /tmp/dvc-storage/d5/df97ac43b0 as well?

Answer 1

To recap, your DVC project's default remote found in a local directory (/tmp/dvc-storage). OK

1. All your data files are in /tmp/dvc-storage so that's where you could point your file explorer to, but this type* of DVC remote (local directory) is not meant for direct human handling. They're been renamed and reorganized in the same way as the project cache.
   Basically, the directory structure (let's call it space dimension) AND data versions (time dimension) are flattened into a content-addressable data store. This is why you see all those 2 letter directories containing long hex file names (similar to Git Object Storage).

2. By default nothing is deleted from the cache (or remote storage) during regular dvc operations. The data store is append-only for the most part. This way you can git checkout and dvc checkout (or dvc pull) the data for a previous project version (past Git repo commit).
   You'd have to specifically garbage collect certain data from cache or storage locations using dvc gc, and even then it's designed to try preserving stuff you might need in the future.

3. Note that dvc add does not affect remote storage, it only works with the local cache. You need to dvc push and dvc pull to sync the data cache with a DVC remote.
   Wrt the Studio UI, I'm not sure where you see that path but its correct (as its hopefully clearer now). You'd get the same from dvc get --show-url, so maybe reading that reference helps.

* Note that DVC remotes can integrate with cloud versioning on Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, and Google Cloud Storage (probably more in the future). This means that if you use those types and enable this feature, you'll see the same directory structure as in your project folder (not the obfuscated cache structure). Cloud-versioned remotes are easier to handle directly (although it may also not be ideal).