Data Storage #

Obviously, the lab traffics in a variety of large to very-large datasets. To that end, we have a variety of storage tools that researchers can use for projects.

Lab NAS #

There’s a lab NAS in Prof. Pence’s office. Unfortunately, we’re still working on the ability to connect to the NAS from elsewhere on campus. Apparently it’s relatively frowned-upon to have private servers at UCLouvain, but there’s not really any infrastructure to get multiple terabytes of storage otherwise. So for now, if you need to deal with something really big (at the moment, primarily just the evoText full-text archives), come by the office. There’s a small pirate-radio network that you can connect to, and that will give you fileserver access; ask me about it if you need it.

rsync.net #

The contents of the lab NAS are mirrored to the offsite backup service provided by rsync.net. This service is expensive, but provides us our only (and very important) off-site backup service.

UCLouvain Storage #

If you really want to have UCLouvain host your storage for you, there is mass storage available from the Center for High-Performance Computing and Mass Storage (CISM). There is a fee associated with their services, so talk with me and/or them before setting anything up for the first time.

There are rumors about an old group storage system via the Windows Active Domain controller (which is called ‘oasis’). I can however only find very old pages about this on the UCLouvain website, so I’m led to believe that the system was shut down once they realized that everybody was using personal Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. accounts.