File Storage
Contents
Standard AFS
Students here at NC State are given 50 MB of AFS storage space, or quota, for keeping all their files on the University servers. There are times, however, when this is not enough. A professor may require group or individual projects which would cause the students to exceed their individual quotas. It is for this reason Course Workspace Lockers are available–to provide additional space for students should they need it.
This space can be accessed in a number of ways. On Suns, your default directory is your AFS space. Using the command “cd ~” will return you to it at any point. On Windows machines, the Wolfcall softwaare will mount this space as your K: drive. Additionally, you can use an FTP client and connect to http://ftp.ncsu.edu to access your files.
Course Workspace
Information within this system refers to an ITECS service. Please visit http://www.itecs.ncsu.edu for official documentation.
Instructors in the College of Engineering are the only people allowed to request additional workspace. The augmented quota is free of charge, but is not added on to existing quota. Course workspace works in conjunction with WolfWare to generate access lists to various lockers. Instructors can configure lockers for common access, group access, or student access; effectively granting or limiting access to certain groups.
It is important to note that the Spring 2003 semester was the first semester course workspace lockers were offered. They are still in the testing phase, so please be patient. Regular backups are not done on this space, and information is lost at the end of the semester the course is taught. Data is also not archived, so you must contact eoshelp@ncsu.edu for information regarding preservation of content before the end of the semester.
For more information regarding Course Workspace Lockers, pleace visit the official Course Workspace Lockers page. To request a Course Workspace Locker, go to the Locker Request page.
Research and Administrative Space
Information within this system refers to an ITECS service. Please visit http://www.itecs.ncsu.edu for official documentation. This, however, is only for faculty to request more quota should students need it. What if, in the course of their research, they should happen to need more disk quota? Well, that is what the Administrative and Research lockers are for. This are secure lockers designed for materials that do not need to be on the Internet. When requesting an administrative or research locker, faculty and staff must note who owns the locker, who has access to the locker, how large of a quota is needed, and a name for the locker. The configurations for the lockers are identical, but the paths to the lockers differ slightly. Research lockers have the added option for individual user lockers. Should you desire for your research users to each have extra AFS space, we can create space for them under a “users” directory. By default, all memebers of the research group have the ability to see other users’ research. If requested, this may be turned off; however, the locker owner will always have read privileges over the entirity of their locker. In contrast to course workspace lockers, administrative and research lockers are backed up on a regular basis. They are backed up nightly and you can request a backup for any file no older than 28 days old. The locker itself can not be used for delivering any sort of web content. For more information on administrative and research lockers, plesase visit the Admin and Research Locker Request page.
Adding UserSpace to your Research Locker
http://www.eos.ncsu.edu/lockers/portal On the site above, you should see your research space, under the section “Research”. Click on it. The page you now see has some basic information about your volume, and 4 menus at the bottom. Click “View/Edit User Volumes”. Here you can delete old volumes, change quotas (click “edit”) for individuals, or create a new user locker (type the unityID in the empty box, click “Add”). You may also request that lockers be deleted.
Mapping drives to Older NAS devices
Some older NAS devices are not able to handle the higher security settings that active directory uses. For example the Buffaloe NAS is inaccessible to active directory computers without a group policy to simplify authentication. To fix create a new group policy that makes the following change. Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Security Options Network security: LAN Manager authentication level = Send NTLM response only
Connecting to a Share on a Active Directory computer from a non Acive Directory system
If a organization is in the middle of upgradding to active Directory it may need to be able to connect to a share on a Active Directory machine from a system that is not part of the domain. To do this go to START>RUN and type in the IP of the Machine that has the share. Then when prompted for user name and password . Type this in as the user name wolftech.ad.ncsu.edu\rdnorris (user name). After doing this you should be able to connect as long as that user has the correct rights to the network share.
Backups
How many of you keep important or confidential information on your computer? I would guess that many of you have important or confidential information stored on your computer. Regardless of what it is, you do not want to lose the information you worked so hard to create. This is the reason you need to backup your computer files regularly.
A backup is a simply a copy of data from one medium to another which runs independently of the source medium. Backups include burning files to a CD-ROM, transfering files to another computer, or knowing that the files saved on your AFS space receive nightly backups.
If you have ever accidently deleted a file, suffered a computer virus, or ran into some other loss or corruption of data, you have most likely learned the value of a good backup. However, if you still think, “It wont happen to me,” you’ll be in for a shock when you lose that document you have been working on for the past six months. Trust us. We’ve seen it happen.
AFS
Yes, that is right, every night around midnight, all the files on the AFS partition are automatically saved to a backup. Here they are stored until the next backup twenty-four hours into the future. Should you need to restore a file off the backup, this NCSU Help Knowledgebase solution should be able to aid you in your task.
If, however, you should need a file that is older than twenty-four hours, you will need to request a restore from a tape backup. This process involves humans other than you, and is time consuming. In light of this, you will only get two shots at recovering a file. If you need to request a restore from a tape backup, please e-mail help@ncsu.edu. Be aware that as of November 2006, tape backups will only extend back 21 days — this is reduced from the 28 day backup we’ve had for the past few years.
Restoring Files from AFS
Veritas
Your entire PC can be backed up as well. This is all accomplished via VERITAS Netbackup Professional on the domained Windows 2000/XP workstations. VERITAS is considered by many to be one of the leaders in desktop and laptop recovery; providing nightly backups and easy restoration methods.
Administrative staff have an automatic backup of their files generated nightly. Research groups are welcome to subscribe to this service provided they consult with Wolftech regarding the expense of the required software and server.
External USB Drives
FolderShare
If your users use multiple machines and are looking for a way to keep personal data synchronized between those machines, FolderShare is the answer. There is no ‘in the cloud’ storage provided, however, it allows you to set up your own private P2P network to maintain replicas of any file folders you wish across any number of machines with no limit to the amount of data within the replica (at least I have not run into one). I have used FolderShare for the last three or so years to keep my laptops and home PC synched. It is especially nice when I need to build a new machine or re-build an old one as I no longer worry about having to figure out how to migrate the data. I simply install the FolderShare agent, log into my account and let my data synchronize from one of my online replicas – all I need is a Internet connection on at least one replica machine and the new machine – the service just finds the replica and starts synching. Since it uses UPNP, it is NAT/FW friendly in most scenarios. All transfers are authenticated using RSA and AES over SSL encryption… There is even a OS X client so yes, it supports synching with replicas on that ‘other’ OS! Other nice features include the ability to search and download from your data from any Internet connected machines as long as at least one replica is online somewhere. You can also invite friends to share a common set of folders that you can use as a data drop among peers – think of it as a poor man’s Groove. FolderShare is still technically a beta and is part of the Window Live Service offerings and is free to use. http://www.foldershare.com/
Celerra
This is a CIFS based storage system which OIT charges $700 per TB per year for. This service has multiple redundancies, disaster recovery to offsite tape backups, and allows for short term self-restores of data should you delete something you didn’t intend to. All access is limited to specific unityids.
One thing to point out is that currently, 5 accounts cannot be used to purchase the space. Dan’s been pushing them (repeatedly) to allow for that but unfortunately they’re still not an option.
All management of the space is provided by us and we map this storage to the “Z” drive on ECE Windows machines. The space is also accessible from non-domained Windows machines and Macs as well, though that requires some manual setup on those machines. So this space could be used for backups or normal storage of research data for all of your domained Windows machines, as well as this student’s personal laptop.
In general, the Celerra service is definitely our recommendation for storage space for research data and/or backups. It’s accessible from Windows/Mac, can even be accessed from off-campus (need VPN), and would provide network storage space that is backed up regularly for your Windows research machines and possibly your Mac machines as well.
Personal Space
NCSU Drive
http://oit.ncsu.edu/unity-accounts/ncsu-drive 5GB as of 5/20/13
Google Team Drives
Limitations (as of 3/2/2018)
See Google’s Support Site for details.
- 250,000 files
- 20 levels of folders (we recommend that you never get close to this)
- 750GB of file uploads per day per Google account.