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Department of Genetics

 

Disk storage on departmental fileserver "Larch"

Beyond a basic provision of 4 terabytes, an extension to this allocation and will cost £38 per terabyte per year (£9.5/TB/quarter, £3.16/TB/month). Bills will be issued each quarter (November-January, Feb-April, May-July and August-October) based on the highest permitted allocation during the preceding quarter.

This price does not include any off-site backup.

Space on larch can be used for general file storage, Windows 10 "File History" backup or macOS "Time Machine" backup.

Off-site tape backup

Beyond a basic provision of 4 terabytes per quarter, any extra data backed up above this basic provision will incur a charge of £12 per whole terabyte, billed quarterly as above.

Note that the backup system records all changes in an additive manner, so that if you have three 1TB files but then change one of them 4TB will be used and previous versions remain available for a year. 1TB of data that does not change will cost £12 per quarter to backup (£48 per year.)

By default Larch is backed up using this system, but folders can be excluded from backup by creating a file called ".nobackup" in a folder and the backup software will ignore all the folder contents.

This system is only capable of backing up computers that are on continuously with a fixed network address, this means it is best suited to servers.

Further details.

Tape archival

Data can be moved onto tape for a one off fee of £12 per TB plus the cost of the tape. Two copies recommended.

UIS Services

Indicative prices correct as of May 2018, official information can be found on the UIS Self Service website.

RDS: Research Data Store. Directly linked at very high speed to HPC compute. File size & count restrictions. External access via SSH protocols. £54/TB/year. 500,000 files per TB allocated.

RFS: Research File Share. Similar to Larch, but with two copies across two buildings. SMB/CIFS (Windows/Mac) compatible file storage with snapshots. £139/TB/year.

RCS: Research Cold Store. Hybrid disk/tape system. File size & count restrictions, retrieval can be slow (possibly a few days.) External access via SSH protocols. £30/TB/year. 100,000 files permitted per TB allocated.

Cloud Services

These may not be suitable for data containing private information. The linked pages have more information.

Microsoft Onedrive: 1TB free for college students and university staff. Maximum ~10GB individual file size limit.

Google Drive: Unlimited free storage for members of the university. Maximum 5TB individual file size limit.

Dropbox Business: Unlimited storage £55/£66 student/staff.