Ahhh - the perks (necessities) of academia 
You're right - SSH does solve a lot of problems (at least regarding storage).
A good deal of the data is WRDS data that I've subsequently cross-referenced and massaged. It took some time to get it formatted just as I want it, so I can't just use the "native" WRDS fiels with SSH.
Also, I'm still "old school" enough that I like to have my data local. After all, hard drive space is cheaper alll the time, and it works a bit faster (as long as you have enough RAM). If you don't (and the datasets are big enough), SSH is (I think) faster.
Why not just use SSH on WRDS?
Commenting by HaloScan
