Third Party Cloud Storage

Third party cloud storage, such as Commercial Drop Box or iCloud, are hosted off-site.

These locations should not be used to hold University information.

• Queen’s has no control over the documents stored by third-parties
• There have been some instances reported of third-parties being hacked, and information stolen
• If you have any University data in these non-approved consumer solutions, you should migrate the data to University approved file store platforms such as the Q: Drive, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint or Teams.

Local Storage

Local storage is considered to be anything you store on the hard disk of the workstation you are using. This includes the C: drive, the Desktop, or a temporary folder (e.g. C:\Temp).

This is generally considered the least attractive storage option.

• Local storage is not backed-up.
• If you’re using a student machine, local storage will be wiped when the machine is rebooted.
• Local storage is not accessible from off-site.

Portable Storage

Portable storage is considered to be anything you attach to a workstation. This includes USB sticks, media cards or portable hard disks.

• Storage capacity is dependent on the device purchased
• Portable storage is easy to use and is useful for transferring data from one system to another
• Portable storage is not backed up
• USB sticks especially are prone to failing, and data recovery is not always possible
• Confidential information should not be stored on portable storage, due to the inherent risk of it being easily lost or stolen

QUB Dropoff

QUB Dropoff is not a data storage option.

QUB Dropoff is a web-based service which faciliates Queen's users to send large files (up to 10Gb) to other Queen's and non-Queen's users. Queen's users are those whose have access to Queen’s Online.

Also external users can avail of this service to send files to Queen's staff or students. 

This is a temporary file service. All files are automatically removed after 14 days.

You can find more information at sending large files.

High Performance Computing

The Research Computing team at Queen's University provide a number of centrally managed High Performance Computing (HPC) systems.  Researchers can avail of these systems in order to solve compute and data intensive problems. For more information visit High Performance Computing.

Outlook

Outlook is not a data storage option. Outlook is primarily an email application but also includes a calendar, task manager and contacts manager.

Outlook is not recommended for data storage because it is unstructured from a data storage viewpoint and only accessible to you.

Outlook is not recommended for data sharing because you are not actually sharing the data but only sending a copy which may quickly become out of date.