Group Space

There are three main uses for group space:

1. To store large amounts of data that's not appropriate for your home directory.
2. A shared area where several people can collaborate on the same files.
3. To work on something that may be handed over to someone else after you leave or move to another project.

A typical group space path would be: /afs/inf.ed.ac.uk/group/project/project-name/.

Requesting group space

All requests for a new group space, or for more space to be allocated to an existing area, should be made via computing support.

• ⇒ How to contact computing support.

The cost depends on how much space you ask for, how long you want it for, and whether it needs to be mirrored and backed up to tape.

Disk space pricing is currently under review. Please contact support for more information.

Group web space

Group space can be made available on the web, if desired.

• ⇒ Group web space.

Things to bear in mind

• By default space is provided on our redundant SAN storage in the Forum. This protects against the failure of a single disk or power supply.
• Mirroring makes an extra nightly copy of your data to disks held at Kings' Buildings, to protect against disaster befalling the Forum server room.
• Daily tape backups are done at Kings Buildings, with daily backups being kept for 6 months, and monthly backups kept for 13 months. In the event of a disaster, restoring from tape will take longer.
• Staff involved in research are now entitled to 0.5TB of storage on the central Datastore service. Half of this can be allocated to a group area on Datastore. Further storage for these areas can be purchased - but note that this incurs a yearly charge, unlike the current Informatics options. For more details, see Data storage options.

• ⇒ Data storage options.

For large volumes, due to the way AFS stores "Yesterday" data, support may find it useful to know how much daily data churn there is likely to be.

For truly huge space requests, for example tens of terabytes, it may make more sense for your project to buy its own SAN storage. Again, contact computing support if this may apply to you.

• ⇒ How to contact computing support.
• ⇒ Data storage options.