One of the resources available to all Faculty and Staff is network storage for personal files. This is a directory stored on one of our network servers that only you have access to.

These directories should be accessible by clicking on the "My Computer" icon on the desktop and locating the drive listed as "N:" If it is not available contact the Help Desk and we will assist you. Many departments also use shared network folders for organizing files and documents used by multiple people or an office. Your supervisor or department manager can alert you of these.

Network storage is a safe place to store important documents and is a more reliable option than your computer hard drive, CD-R or floppy disk. The server is backed up regularly and if it fails there are safeguards in place for us to recover files. While we may be able to retrieve your files should your hard drive fail, we have had cases where all documents and programs were lost. Floppy disks and CD-Rs are even more susceptible to failure due to corruption or physical damage.

Faculty and staff are provided 2Gb of storage space for their individual network directories. By way of comparison, a floppy disk can only hold 1.4mb of information. While we are glad to offer you access to network storage space, we ask that you would only store files essential to your work there and that you would not backup your entire hard drive or try to store programs in these directories. Such behavior will only take up your allotted space, as will keeping multiple copies of files or archives. Additionally, if your harddrive were to fail, programs must be reinstalled, so backing up the .exe files is useless in nearly every case.

If you would like to backup all the contents of your computer on a regular basis, contact the IT HelpDesk and we will recommend an alternative solution.