The UW-Madison Biotechnology Center is currently open and following the university’s COVID-19 Response regarding campus operations.
UW-Madison PIs can sign up for ResearchDrive, a highly reliable storage system that provides 5 TB of free storage. We can deliver your data to that storage, making it unnecessary for you to download it from our servers. The data on our servers is only retained for 60 days.SMPH PIs now have access to a separate instance of ResearchDrive for restricted data. It is functionally equivalent and we can deliver data to it in the same way. If an SMPH PI has BOTH ResearchDrive and restricted ResearchDrive we will deliver to the “regular” ResearchDrive.
Support for setting up these drives and connecting to them is provided by DoIT. Please direct any support questions to them. Questions having to do with delivery of specific data should go the UWBC facility that produced the data.
New data is delivered every night as it becomes available. The PI associated with the account will get a notification email each time data is delivered.
Signing up
There is a DoIT KB Article with instructions to sign up for the service. When you sign up you need to check the box to allow the UW Biotechnology Center to create a UWBC-dropbox folder and put data there.
Once you have signed up DoIT will provision the storage and we will begin delivering data to your UWBC-dropbox folder. Generally data delivery will start the same day DoIT provisions the storage or the day after. Data is delivered every night. If your data set is very large you may find that it’s delivered in stages over several days.
Cautions
Once your UWBC-dropbox folder is created you MUST NOT rename it or move it! If you do your data deliveries will fail.
ResearchDrive storage space
If you run out of storage space during a data delivery you will get an error message emailed to you. At that point you have two options:
- Delete some data from your ResearchDrive to make more space. We DO NOT recommend moving data to USB drives. They are not reliable and put your data at risk! Typical USB drives have a 5% failure rate. ResearchDrive is highly reliable and is backed up off campus. If you move your data be certain you know what risks you are taking.
- Increase your quota. This is the better option if your data has any value to you. Your first 5 TB is free. DoIT charges $200 / TB / year for additional storage space. Increasing your quota has no effect on your charge, you will be charged based on the amount of storage you are actually using on the first of each month. You can increase your quota using the same form you used to sign up for ResearchDrive.
Data sharing
DoIT provides mechanisms to share ResearchDrive data with your colleagues. It is not necessary to contact UWBC for this.