Administrative Data Storage
Sharable Storage and Individual User Directories for UMN Departments
Overview
For University of Minnesota departments, this service provides a central, shareable document storage system for UMN faculty and staff. Administrative Data Storage (ADS) is intended for primary work and administrative data files used in everyday tasks and provides mapped drives from which you can access your documents.
In the past it has been known as General Data Storage, Enterprise Network Attached Storage (eNAS), Active Directory file storage, or Bulk file storage.
Highlights
- Availability: The service has a planned full outage window of 10 to 20 minutes, 1–2 times per semester to perform security patching and regular maintenance. Notifications will be sent in advance of any outage so that you are able to plan your work accordingly.
- Data redundancy: We provide redundancy within a storage array to help protect data from hardware failures.
- Data replication: Data is replicated to another physical site to protect data in case of facility failures.
- Snapshots: We take snapshots of all data every eight hours and are kept for thirty days to protect data from unintended file deletion.
- Access management: Files stored on this service can be accessed anywhere on a UMN system campus by any networked device, and via Virtual Private Network (VPN) when you are off-campus
- Self-service file restores: Data can be restored from snapshots for Windows, Mac, and Linux computers.
- Drive mapping: Allows for many types of standard drive mappings (e.g., Net Use/Net Map/Mount).
- Secure: ADS is professionally managed and regularly goes through review to meet security and encryption standards.
Getting Started
Requirements
Users must:
- Have University Internet IDs.
- Connect to the University network or VPN when off campus.
- Onboard through the Customer Experience Standardization (CESI) process.
Appropriate Use
Administrative Data Storage (ADS) is a shared storage space across the University. For the best experience, follow these guidelines for appropriate use.
- ADS is an appropriate storage service for data that is active and needs to be accessed quickly and regularly.
- ADS is appropriate for administrative data, business or Financial Office documents, or individual user files that may not be a good fit for Google Drive.
- ADS is not intended to be used for research data, for processing high performance workloads, databases of any kind, virtual machines, or other transactional workloads (e.g.STATA, SAS, ArcGIS, etc.).
- ADS is not intended for personal use.
- Appropriate data security classifications for ADS are:
- Private Restricted
- Private-Highly Restricted (Non-HIPAA, Non-PCI)
- Public
- For guidance on how to appropriately classify your data, see the University of Minnesota policy library on Data Security Classifications by Type.
Data Classification
- Private Restricted (medium security level)
- Public
- Appendix | Data Security Classifications by Type (umn.edu)
Get Help
Intended Audience
Students
Instructors
Researchers
Staff & Departments
Health Sciences Affiliates
IT Staff and Partners
Cost
University-funded.