The best place to keep your files is in your “My Documents” directory (which can also be found under the “Libraries” section). This directory gets mapped to your home folder on our file server. Please don't try to store files anywhere else on the workstation C: drive, as other areas are not backed up and may be wiped clean without warning!

One exception on the C: drive is the folder “C:\Scratch”. This can be a useful place to store large temporary files, where they can be accessed without any network overhead. But don't try to use it for permanent storage.

If your group has any kind of additional shared storage space set up, it may be automatically mapped as a separate drive for you, but you can also find it on the network by consulting our page on physics file servers.

If you accidentally delete a file, or want to recover from unwanted changes, you can access older “snapshots” of your data. Right-click on either the folder or file you're interested in, and choose “Restore previous versions”. A window appears where you can choose versions of that file or folder from various points in time.

Snapshots are usually made twice a day (at 7am and at noon), during weekdays (Monday–Friday). Exactly how long they are kept depends on demand for storage space on that particular volume.

We also make longer-term backups to tape, but these are intended more for disaster recovery than day-to-day restores of accidentally-deleted files, etc.

more general information: data