File and Data Storage

Engineering IT Shared Services' staff of technical professionals can provide a range of robust IT infrastructure services to meet the needs of the College. Engineering IT provides private data storage services for all faculty, staff and students within the Grainger College of Engineering. 

If Engineering IT does not have or cannot provide the solution required  for your project or workflow there are several other on-premise and cloud solutions available.

• Top Storage FAQs
• Additional Questions
• Storage Solutions (At-a-Glance)
• Private Files and Home Directories
• Data Migration or Transfer Tools
• List of Storage Solutions
• Funding Agency Repositories/Requirements
• What are Best Practices for Managing Data? (PDF)

Top Storage FAQs

Are you working with sensitive data?
Whether it's FERPA, HIPAA, CUI, or other sensitive data, your data needs to be handled safely and stored in secure repositories. If you're unsure that your data is sensitive contact your Primary Investigator and/or funding agency.

Do you have a 'Data Management Plan'?
Your funding agency may require one but regardless it's a best practice to think about the life cycle of your data, how it is obtained, organized, and retired are good starting discussion points. 

How critical is data loss?
Many funding agencies require you to ensure that data is preserved, regardless, losing data can be a loss of significant time. Considering backup or disaster recovery options is generally worth the time and money. 

Additional Questions

There are other questions to consider when determining the appropriate storage option for your project, you can find some of them below.
If you would like to meet with someone to discuss your needs please email the Research Technology Facilitator, Ethan Conner (ewconner@illinois.edu). 

• How large are the files/data sets are you working with?
• Does your project have external collaborators?
• How rapidly will your storage needs grow?
• Does your project require high performance or throughput computation?

Storage Solutions (At-a-Glance)

Disclaimer: A system listed as "Compliant" in our matrix for our case means that system follows best practices. Some cloud services will require additional configuration to adhere to individual policies. Additionally, for full compliance a self-assessment for client machines and processes is required.

A full-sized version of this matrix can be found here.

Private Files and Home Directories

Engineering IT provides home directories for faculty, staff, and students. Faculty and Staff are charged $79/TB/year, billed to the department. These private folders can be mounted as network drives. 
Students can access their home directory storage through an Engineering Workstation Lab computer or via the Citrix application. 

Data Migration or Transfer tools

• Globus | Data Transfer
• 4CeeD | File Uploader, Metadata Extraction, and File Management Services

List of Storage Solutions

• Engineering IT can help design tailored solutions around project requirements.
• Taiga & Granite
• Nightingale
• Research Storage as a Service (RSaaS)
• Illinois Data Bank
• Azure Storage
• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Office 365
• U of I Box
• Amazon Glacier

Funding Agency Repositories/Requirements

In August 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) updated their policy memorandum directing federal agencies to develop policies to make the publications and data resulting from federally funded research freely available to the public. Each funding agency may have specific requirements that could influence data access and storage decisions. More detailed information about funding agency requirements can be found at the links below.

• The University's Main Library page on OSTP Mandate
• CHORUS (Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States)