What to consider?
Technical and procedural aspects are important to consider when selecting a suitable storage, for example:
| ♻️Data lifecycle | Is storage needed for active data (with frequent access and use, usually during a project) or for cold/static data (usually after project ends)? | |
| 🔐Data types | Are you storing personal or otherwise sensitive data? Note that not all storage options are suitable for this. | |
| 💻Storage capacity | How much data you expect to store? |
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| 👥Collaboration features | Do you need to share data with collaborators within or outside your organization? |
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| 🔑Access control | How should data be accessed? Do you need different access rights for different collaborators? |
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| ☁️Connectivity and availability | How you need to connect/transfer data to and from storage? Do you need to integrate storage with other platforms or computing services? | |
| 🚨Security | Consider security aspects of the storage, including also whether data is automatically backed-up and whether disaster recovery is possible. |
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| 🧮Costs | What are the costs of storage during and after the project (preservation period of the data)? | |
| 🌱Energy footprint | Some storage options have a lower energy footprint than others. |
Which data storage options are available at the UU?
The UU supports different solutions at the UU for storing and managing data – such as Yoda or Surf Research Drive among others.
- Find the UU supported storage solutions in the UU Storage Finder tool.
In addition: the Faculty of Science also provides
- a network storage service for active data with default mount on Gemini HPC – Beta File System
- access to tape library service for static data – SURF Data Archive.
For storage requests contact rdm-beta@uu.nl.
| Yoda | SURF Research Drive | Beta File System | SURF Data Archive | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ♻️Data lifecycle | active & static data includes data publication platform |
active data | active data | static data | |
| 🔐Data types | suitable for sensitive data | suitable for sensitive data | suitable for sensitive data with encryption | suitable for sensitive data with encryption | |
| 💻Storage capacity | large | large – per requested quota | large – per requested quota | large – per 10 TB quota | |
| 👥Collaboration | collaboration is possible within and outside the UU | collaboration is possible within and outside the UU | collaboration is possible within the UU | not meant for collaboration. if needed, multiple users can access data |
|
| 🔑Access control | yes | yes | yes | yes | |
| ☁️Connectivity | cloud, access via web portal, network disc or irods | cloud, access via web portal | network, embedded as network disc | cloud, access via SSH command line | |
| 🧮Costs | For overview of costs see ICT-Bèta Wiki (login required) | ||||
For more details: visit the new UU Storage Finder 2.0 (coming soon!)
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- Plan in advance! Clarifying the type, size and sensitivity of your data and considering collaboration and long-term preservation needs will help you identify storage requirements and ensure security and compliance. See Planning for Data Management.
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- Include FAIR considerations as part of your data storage workflow and ensure your storage space is well organized. See How to organize your data for reproducibility?
- Maintain your storage tidy. Schedule a regular (spring) clean-up of your data storage space. See Quick Guide: Data Storage Clean Up.
In this reading guide you will find good practices for storage and preservation or your research data.
Responsibilities of storage and back-up of research data
You should ensure you store your data safely with suitable back up strategy. There are several back-up schemes possible, and the selection of the strategy for each researcher will depend on several factors as the dynamics of the data ( how often are new versions created), the time a back-up takes, the space you have and costs of making a back-up, the risk of losing important information between back-ups. See Storing data during Research | RDM Support
It’s always recommended to have back-ups of master data files, including one at a separate location. Where a university-supported storage medium is used, is almost certain that regular back-ups of data are made automatically. Below the backup policies of research data storage services offered by the Faculty of Science
| Disaster Recovery | Recovering previous versions of files | |
|---|---|---|
| Yoda (UU) |
✅ Yoda data is replicated across geographically distributed datacenters as protection against site level loss. |
Yoda provide a temporary back-up functionality to retrieve earlier versions of data files (revisions). Revisions are kept for 16 weeks. |
| Yoda (SURF) |
✅ Yoda data is replicated across geographically distributed datacenters as protection against site level loss. |
Recovery data is kept for 60 days. |
| SURF Research Drive |
✅ Disaster recovery backups are made every 24 hours. Incremental backups are created daily using Duplicity with 30-day retention. |
Trashbin and versioning: Deleted files can be restored via the web interface under "Deleted files". Versioning allows retrieval of previous file versions. Earlier versions are stored everytime you upload a new file and retained for 14 days. |
| Beta File System |
❗ Only if double storage is requested BFS stores data in two physically separate data centers. Data stored in a single storage modality does not have a disaster recovery backup. |
Default 24 x hourly data snapshots current day + 1 daily snapshot kept for 60 days |
| SURF Data Archive |
✅ Geographic redundancy – two copies in two different locations: Amsterdam and Haarlemmermeer municipalities. |
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Using a local NAS (Network Attached Storage) for storage of research data is strongly discouraged at Utrecht University (UU). Explore alternative options for your active/warm data (such as Yoda or SURF Research Drive) or your static/cold data (such as Yoda or SURF Data Archive).
A local NAS may only be used as a temporary backup in addition to one of these approved systems — never as the primary storage.
- Unsuitability for Permanent or Archival Storage
A NAS is not recognized as a compliant solution for long-term preservation, as it does not support FAIR data archiving nor meets the UU security, backup and data retention guides, which recommend institutional-grade redundancy, versioning, and disaster recovery.
- Limited Accessibility and Collaboration
A local NAS is only accessible from the network segment (VLAN) where the NAS is connected. It cannot be reached over Wi-Fi (including eduroam) or from outside the UU network (e.g., home, conferences, international collaborators). This severely restricts teamwork, especially for multi-institution or remote projects.
- Security and Compliance Risks
Local NAS devices often lack enterprise-level encryption in transit and at rest, audit trails and access logging required for sensitive data, automatic compliance with GDPR or collaborating partners mandates.
In addition NAS systems present frequently a single point of failure: hardware damage, theft, or ransomware can result in total data loss.
- No Institutional Support or Recovery
UU IT does not back up local NAS systems and in case of failure, there is no institutional recovery option— data loss is permanent.