Research data storage services

Available space

• Space is allocated to individual researchers on request, within a total allowance per college.
• Default allocation is 50GB per researcher, but additional space can be provisioned subject to approval.

Collaboration

• Internally, multiple Flinders’ staff and students can have access to the same R Drive folder for ease of collaboration. Permission can be read-only or read/write.
• External collaborators can be granted a sponsored FAN to enable them to access the R Drive folder within the university’s security protections.

Storage and backup

All data is stored on Flinders’ University owned and operated hardware. Replication to a second site (geographic replication) ensures the safety and resiliency of data on the platform. There are different options available for retention of data on R Drive. While data is stored on the platform and not deleted, it will be retained indefinitely. There are three retention options for users of the R Drive;

• No retention (nr): Snapshots are taken daily and retained for up to 90 days to support immediate roll back to the point in time copy, and also allow the user to restore data from a previous version. Data is not backed up to tape. 
• Short term retention (str): Full backups are conducted with 300 day granular file recovery. To support immediate roll back to the point in time copy, and also allow the user to restore data from a previous version, snapshots are taken daily and retained for up to 90 days. All data is backed up to tape.
• Long term retention (ltr): Backups are incremental and consolidated with 60 day granular file recovery. To support immediate roll back to the point in time copy, and also allow the user to restore data from a previous version, snapshots are taken daily and retained for up to 90 days. All data is backed up to tape.

Data security

Suitable for data up to and including Restricted classification. R Drive does not provide encryption at rest for data only encryption of data in flight. Data is transmitted over secure encrypted and authenticated connections. Access to R Drive folders is controlled by Flinders’ IDS staff on request from folder admin users. Data security is governed by the university’s Information Security Policy.

Available space

• Individual space of up to 1TB per staff and researchers (including post-graduate research students);

Collaboration

• A group drive is a place for groups, projects or collaborations of researchers to share files and data among themselves. One or more researchers can manage the group drive and you can be in as many as you need. Group drive space cumulatively to 10TB per institution;
• External collaborators can be added to group drives, with their storage use counting towards the group drive allocation; and personal space up to 10GB for external research collaborators.

Storage and backup

All data is stored on AARNet owned and operated hardware, hosted within Australia at AARNet partner and commercial data centres. Geographic replication ensures node redundancy and CloudStor resiliency. All data is backed up to tape. Backups are incremental and consolidated with 60 day granular file recovery. To support immediate roll back to the point in time copy snapshots are taken every 30 days and retained for up to 6 months.

Data security

Suitable for Restricted data. Not recommended for Highly confidential data. Disk data is encrypted at rest, and data is transmitted over secure encrypted and authenticated connections. Public facing services are abstracted behind availably focussed proxy servers, with logging and auditing. Access is by best industry practice techniques, including bastion hosts and 2FA authentication. Only the Cloud Services team at AARNet have configuration rights on CloudStor. Access is provided through the university’s affiliation with AARNet and user access is provided and maintained by the university’s policies.

Available space

Store up to 1TB of data. Once the 1TB cap is reached, there is a 24 hour outage where data cannot be accessed.

Collaboration

OneDrive allows you to easily share and collaborate securely with other staff and external users. Careful consideration needs to be taken prior to sharing data outside of the institution.

Storage and backup

OneDrive allows you to recover earlier versions of documents. Version history is stored for 12 months from the date of the last change. Version history will be kept for 12 months after the owner leaves the institution and then will no longer be available. If data becomes corrupted or lost, it can be recovered by request but the folders and structure will be lost.

Data security

OneDrive for Business has been certified to store any University documents classified as public, internal only and restricted. Any highly confidential documents should not be stored on OneDrive for Business.

More information about ROADS can be found on the Library site.