Purpose

Every member of the University (staff or student) is allocated a Home Folder so that they have a secure place in which to keep their University work. This Service is aimed at members who have a requirement in excess of what is provided by the Home Folder Service.

Restrictions

The Home Archive Service storage is not designed for data with a high rate of change or 'churn' but rather for infrequently accessed files. As such the type of data that can be stored on the service is restricted to the below compressed archive formats.

*.zip
*.rar 
*.7z
*.tar
*.tgz
*.gz
*.tib
*.7zp
*.gpg
*.manifest

How do I 'Zip Up' my files?

See Compressing or Zipping Up Files. 

Access

Every account with a Home Folder also gets a Home Archive (created within 24 hours of the Home Folder being created).

Firstly, you need to find the folder path for your Home Folder. On a Campus PC, you’ll see that drive H: is connected to something that looks like \\campus\home\home15\ - the important part is the “home15” (you may have a 2- or 4-digit number) - in that example, your Home Archive path would be \\campus\home\archive15\<your username> (e.g \\campus\home\archive15\nabcd1 if nabcd1 was your username).

To add a persistent connection to your Home Archive, open Windows Explorer (by pressing the Windows key and E together), right-click on “Computer” (or “This PC”, depending on your Windows version), and select “Map network drive”. Select an unused drive letter and enter your Home Archive path. Make sure that “Reconnect at sign-in” is ticked, then click Finish.

You can also connect to your Home Archive using RAS. When you sign in to RAS, click the + symbol on the left of the screen. At the top of the menu, select Documents and Drives and then click My Drives. This opens a Windows Explorer window that is hosted by a server on campus. If you click on the Computer tab, you can then select Map network drive and fill out the form as above.

Quotas (How much space?)

Any user requesting the use of this service will receive a 20GB allocation. This is the maximum allocation available and can not be increased further.

Backups and data retention

• If you have deleted a file, or made a catastrophic change by accident, then the Shadow Copy Service enables you to restore older versions of files, up to a maximum of 10 days old. IT Service staff can assist you in using Shadow Copy for file restoration: contact the IT Service Desk .
• Although we makes backups of all Home Archive Folders, these are for use only by the IT Service in case of a need for Disaster Recovery: they are not available for the restoration of individual files or folders. Requests for data restores cannot be granted. System backups are retained for 30 days, after which they are deleted.