Student Clusters & Classrooms: Where to save your work
Whether you are new to the Clusters or returning, please take a minute to review the information below about saving your work.
*****You can no longer save to the Desktop or Documents folders and have your files follow you from computer to computer around campus!*****
Read now and keep from losing your hard work!!!!
Student and staff users of the Student Computing Clusters, technology classrooms, and departmental labs manage by Academic Technology have a range of options for where to save your work. In order of preference, here's our recommendations:
The upsides and downsides of each are below.
Box
UNH provides the Box online storage service to all UNH students and staff. For more general information on Box, see Get Box @ UNH and other KB articles.
| + Unlimited storage | - Have to upload/download via the Box website |
| + Accessible from anywhere on or off campus | |
| + Available from all platforms and mobile devices | |
| + Secure | |
| + Fairly easy to open, edit, and save Office and other standard documents without manually upload/download |
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+ Versioning (keep old and new copies automatically) |
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+ Backed up |
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+ Easy to share and collaborate with others on and off campus |
The Cluster systems do have the Kumo tool installed on the Windows machines which makes your Box storage available as a mounted drive. This makes it more easy to use Box, but it is Windows only and you must to setup in advance. For more info, see How do I get Kumo @ UNH?
Personal USB drives
Most everyone has a USB drive around and they are easy to use in the Clusters. Just plug it in and go!
| + Easy to use | - Easy to lose or forget |
| + You can carry it with you and use it wherever you are | - No backup |
| + Useable across multiple computer platforms | - Usually not secure |
UDrive network storage
All users of the Clusters, students and staff, get access to the UDrive server that provides you with 512 MB of storage. This storage is automatically made available whenever you login to one of the Cluster computers and in the various classrooms, labs, and other computer spaces managed by Academic Technology.
| + Easy to use | - Very limited storage space |
| + It is available in all of the Clusters automatically | - You must specifically choose to save to the UDrive |
| + Secure | - No access from other locations on campus or off campus |
| + Backed up | |
Local hard drive
You can save to the local hard drive of the computer you are currently using, but that's generally a poor choice. Use this only as a last resort or for temporary files you do not care about having later.
Note: If you save to Desktop or Documents, you are saving to the local hard drive and all of these downsides apply!
| + Easy to use | - You only have access to your files on that one computer |
| + Plenty of storage space | - Your files will get deleted after a week or so |
| - Your files may get deleted even sooner due to maintenance needs or system problems | |
| - No backup | |
| - Not very secure |
If you have questions about these, the staff at the AT Support Center in Dimond Library can assist. You can access them at their desk or by using the chat support at clusters.unh.edu/help.
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