Filestores
You can store and access your work files within the University filestores.
Key features
- Your personal filestore (or userfs drive) is your own personal space. All staff and students are provided with 5GB of personal filestore space as standard.
- Shared filestores (or storage drives) can be shared between departments, research groups etc. These can be requested from IT Services and can offer larger storage allowances. More information on shared filestores.
- The Teaching drive is used by departments to share teaching materials with staff and students.
- Any files you store within a University filestore are backed up regularly.
Access instructions
- If you're logging on to a managed Windows desktop computer, your personal filestore is already available as the Documents folder, and your H: and M: drive.
- For other devices and filestores you’ll need to follow our guides to connect to your filestore.
- To access your filestore off campus, you’ll need to use the virtual private network (VPN), virtual desktop service (VDS) or file transfer service.
Additional information
Shared filestores
A shared filestore (also called a storage drive) is an area we reserve for you on our central file servers.
We can provide you with a filestore ranging from a few GB to many TB, and access to your filestore can be restricted to a list of usernames that you can define.
Request a shared filestore
We provide each department with a large shared filestore. This is shared out to all members of the department. Your Departmental Computing Officer (DCO) usually manages the filestore so please contact them in the first instance to request space on your department’s filestore.
If you department does not have a shared filestore, your DCO should contact IT Services with the following information:
- Filestore owner: The username of the person who will “own” the filestore. This will be the main contact for administration purposes - usually the DCO.
- Filename name: Something short and descriptive (usually a shortened version of your department or research group name) and preferably less than 8 characters. In the event of clashes with existing filestore names, some negotiation may be necessary.
- Filestore size: If you are not sure how big you want your filestore to be then we recommend you start small, you can easily add more space later.
Sensitive data and compliance requirements
If your shared filestore will be used to hold sensitive data, our file access auditing service can enable you to satisfy compliance requirements.
Research grants
We are often asked how data is stored on shared filestores by people writing research grants. Below is a summary that can be used. Contact us if you need more information.
- Access to each filestore and folder is restricted and is controlled by the filestore owners.
- All data is copied to three locations, two of which are onsite and one which is offsite. All data is mirrored to all three locations every hour.
- Backup snapshots are taken hourly and last up to 90 days. The snapshots are user accessible and allow people to restore lost or damaged files themselves. The snapshots are also mirrored to the three locations.
- We offer a full audit log of all access and file changes, and a ransomware detector that warns IT staff of any potential ransomware attacks.
While we mostly make filestores available free of charge, it does cost a significant amount of money to provide the service.
If you are applying for research grants or other funding for something that will require a lot of disk space then please add the predicted costs of your filestore usage to the grant. The current price is: £160 per TB per year.
Wherever possible, please include it in any research costs so the money is returned to the University.