File and Data Storage
(Updated June 10th 2026)
Along side of the cloud storage services that are available to you through the university, Engineering IT Shared Services provides home directories for all faculty, staff, and students. If you're part of a group that has scaling data needs, Engineering IT is also able to provide support for dedicated storage virtual or physical machines. This article will show you some of the options available to you, as well as, data management best practices and tools.
If you'd like to hear more about storage options or data transfer solutions, Engineering IT Shared Services has professional staff that would be happy to discuss your work and goals. You can request a consultation at the link here: Request a Technology Consultation
If you're looking to purchase a physical server for your storage needs, we're happy to assist in procurement and support. More information regarding our server support can be found at the following link: Server/ Individual System Support
Storage Resources (At-a-Glance)
On-Premise Services (Private Files)
| Service | Description |
Quota/Cost | Compliance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Engineering IT Home Directories(1) | Grainger College of Engineering faculty, staff, and students are given a home directory to save files to. | 25GB | FERPA compliant |
| Engineering IT Course Directoy | EWS course directories are meant to provide permanent storage for important course files that are needed each time the course is taught. You can find more information at the following link: EWS Labs, Course Directory | 25GB | FERPA compliant |
| Engineering IT supported Virtual Hosting | Engineering IT collaborates with Technology Services to provide virtual machines for Grainger College of Engineering faculty, staff, and students. | Cost can be found at the Virtual Hosting service page at the following link: Virtual Server Hosting | FERPA compliant |
(1) Student EWS Home Directories are cleared after each semester and should only be used for course work. You can find more information at the following link: EWS Labs, Home Directory Policy
On-Premise Services (Large Group or Data Sets)
| Service | Description |
Cost | Compliance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Taiga(2)(3)(4) | NCSA’s high performance global file system, which is integrated with all non-HIPAA compute environments. Provides users with high performance storage for active data. | Internal: $32.01/TB/year
External: $50.76/TB/year |
FERPA compliant |
| Granite(2)(5) | NCSA’s tape archive system, closely integrated with Taiga, to provide users with a place to store long-term archive data. |
Internal: $15.62/TB/year |
FERPA compliant |
| Nightingale(2) | NCSA's secure compute and storage system meets the self-assessed NIST 800-171 standards required by many government agencies. | Internal: $75.74/TB/month External: $99.75/TB/month |
HIPAA compliant CUI compliant |
| Illinois Data Bank |
A public access repository for publishing research data from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. |
No-cost | Not compliant for any sensitive data |
(2) The Illinois Computes program provides a base level of these resources at no cost to researchers in the Illinois University system.
(3) Taiga also offers a full disk purchase solution at $2,240.70 for 14TB for 5 Years, you can find out more at the following link: Taiga Pricing
(4) Taiga does not have a backup service, files there are a single copy and NCSA recommends saving files to Granite or another system. However, Illinois Offsite Disaster Recovery is available for small allocations. More information can be found at the following Taiga documentation page: Data Recovery
(5) Researchers are able to apply for additional Granite storage through the ACCESS cyber-infrastructure program at the following link: Get Started with ACCESS
Cloud Services (Private Files or Small Group)
| Provider | Description | Quota | Compliance |
|---|---|---|---|
| U of I Box(6) | Individual and group storage provided. | Box has unlimited online storage, however quotas will be implemented in the near future |
FERPA compliant |
| Google Drive | Individual (and group folders upon request) storage with live collaboration. | 200GB | Not compliant for any sensitive data |
| Microsoft OneDrive(6) | Individual storage provided for faculty, staff, and students. |
Varies by your license type:
* A1 for Faculty = 100 GB |
FERPA compliant |
| Microsoft Teams(6) | Formerly known as Sharepoints, Microsoft Teams allows for groups to store and collaborate live on documents. | 200GB | FERPA compliant |
| Adobe Creative Cloud | Individual storage provided for university faculty and staff. | 20GB | Not compliant for any sensitive data |
(6) U of I Box, Microsoft OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams/Sharepoint all have a 10-year file retention policy to better protect student data.
Cloud Services (Large Group or Data Sets)
| Provider | Description | Cost | Compliance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Azure | Microsoft Azure has several different storage types along side there virtualization solutions. You can find their full suite at the following link: Azure Storage Products |
Cost scales with storage type, size, and amount of operations. Additional cost and pricing can be found at the following link: Azure Pricing | Complaint solutions are available with appropriate configuration. |
| Amazon S3 |
Among Amazon Web Services' broad portfolio of services there are storage options. Researchers are able to apply for proof-of-concept credits. Getting Started with AWS |
Cost scales with storage type, size, and amount of operations. Additional cost and pricing can be found at the following link: AWS Pricing | Complaint solutions are available with appropriate configuration. |
| ACCESS | ACCESS is a NSF funded cyber-infrastructure program that provides computational and storage services from national institutions. | There are no costs to those with an approved application. Learn more and apply on their website. | Not compliant for any sensitive data |
| Open Storage Network | Storage pods interconnected by national, high-performance networks creating well-connected, cloud-like storage that is easily accessible at high data transfer rates comparable to or exceeding the public cloud storage providers. | There are no cost to researchers, allocations are awarded through an approved application to the ACCESS cyber-infrastructure program. You can apply at the following link: Get Started with ACCESS | Not compliant for any sensitive data |
If none of these solutions fit your needs, or you would like to discuss them in detail, or if you are looking to purchase a physical storage server, Engineering IT would be happy to help. Please reach out to us using the form at the following link: Request a Technology Consultation
Data Management Best Practices
The way you preserve and index your data will affect your ability to use and recover it later. For example, information in an individual user’s Box folder may be inaccessible if they leave campus.
Strike a balance between consistency and uniqueness in your file/folder names. Include important metadata (date, location, version number, etc) in the filename when possible. Example: 2016-10-19_MRL_Hitachi_S4800_Scans
Use the YYYY-MM-DD format for your dates in all places, and enforce this in your labs, project groups, etc. This can help keep files displayed in chronological order, even over several years.
Avoid spaces and special characters in filenames, as they can be problematic with various systems and software applications. • Discuss and document standardized or controlled abbreviations, acronyms, etc.
Create project documentation, even if you only have time to make it brief. Develop templates for your lab to fill out for every project and follow domain-specific metadata schemas when appropriate. One way to do this is to make a "README" file in each folder to briefly describe the folder's contents, naming scheme, and acronyms.
Keep your raw data protected and unchanged - never work on the original. At a minimum, keep an extra copy of the original raw data somewhere in case of accidental changes or deletions. Also keep separate copies of every data transformation (version) made during your processing stages.
Backup your data and projects! A useful mnemonic is the 3-2-1 rule: Keep 3 copies on 2 media types, with 1 remote copy. Media types can include local disk, cloud storage solutions, external disk, etc. Make regular backups, periodically test those backups to ensure you can recover data from them, and develop plans to backup software packages with version-specific features that may be critical to your work.
Use version control. GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket can help maintain a well-organized history of changes to your files. It’s typically used for text-based files such as source code, scripts, etc. Several analytics platforms – including R Studio – integrate with GitHub.
- You may self-provision a personal, publicly accessible repository from GitHub at: https://github.com/personal
- For additional security, you may prefer a repository from Engineering’s instance of GitLab at: https://gitlab-beta.engr.illinois.edu/
- You may provision a personal Bitbucket repository at: https://bitbucket.org/account/signup/
- Box, Google, and Microsoft One Drive also provide some amount of version control.
Know your funders’ requirements. As of February 2013, the federal government requires federally funded research be made public within a certain time frame after publication and requiring that researchers should account for and manage the digital data created from federally funded scientific research. TheUniversity Library's article on the United States Federal OSTP Mandate has a list of funding agencies’ publication requirements.
If you'd like to have a conversation about data management and life cycle with an Engineering IT Shared Services IT professional, please contact us using the following form: Request a Technology Consultation
Data Management Tools
CrashPlan Pro provides backups of folders and files that you select on the computer(s) you choose.
Globus enables users to move large amounts of data between machines and some cloud services securely and reliably.
4CeeD offers a robust suite of data management and curation tools. From managing files and metadata to sharing your research with collaborators.