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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

Available to staff and students

Staff and students can use this service on University-managed devices. Students can also access their personal filestores on their personal devices.

App-based

Compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux.

Funded by the University

There isn’t a cost to you for standard use. We may need to charge for very large filestores (typically more than 100TB).

Additional information

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.

Access instructions

Related tools

Guides and help

How-to guides and set up

Search all our guides and help

Contact for support

If you are experiencing technical issues and need advice, please contact IT Services.

Service commitments

We expect you to:

  • Manage the filestores allocated to you (eg sharing or securing files and folders appropriately, deleting files you no longer need, etc
  • Contact us in good time if you are beginning to run short of storage space.
  • Discuss any forthcoming work with us that might require large amounts of additional storage space to be allocated to you.

The following policies apply to all IT services provided by the University.

Availability

Support

  • This service is managed by IT Services.
  • We are responsible for monitoring, identifying and fixing faults.
  • Support is available during our opening hours.

Standards

  • Our service performance and standards have been produced in consultation with our customers, and we monitor the delivery, performance and availability of facilities and services.

We appreciate feedback as it helps us review and continually improve our service.

Page last reviewed: 9 September 2024