Is my data secure?

The quick answer is yes. Paul Thacker, our network administrator explains in detail why that is below:

Network Help: What are the Network Drives and how are they backed up.

Questions about our network drives come up periodically and I thought I would address this with a quick document of the configuration. We have 3 drive areas that make up our primary data areas for the School of Nursing.

V Drive - Personal Share The 'Personal' area - is also our V drive. This area is intended for individual use only and not to share data between users. Use it to store or backup files or data. If you put things here from one computer, then log on to another computer - you can access those files and only you will have access to these files.

There are live copies that are easily accessible via Windows Previous Versions which is setup on two different servers. The Primary Server backs up the Personal Data every hour and goes back about 2 days. The Secondary Server backs up every Monday at 7am and goes back about a month and a half.

These files are backed up nightly and will be stored for 60 days. 60 days would apply only to the latest backup of that file. The system is setup to store 7 versions of any given file; the previous 6 versions would be stored for 45 days.

K Drive - Group Share The 'Group' area - is our K drive. This area is intended for sharing files or data between members of specific groups. Use it to store, backup or share files between group members. Non-group members will have no access to these folders or directories.

There are live copies that are easily accessible via Windows Previous Versions which is setup on two different servers. The Primary Server backs up the Group Data every 1.5 hours and goes back about 3 days. The Secondary Server backs up every Monday at 7am so that backup goes back roughly a month and a half.

Nightly backups are also done to our offsite storage and those are retrievable for 3yrs. This system is setup to store 7 versions of any given file. Ex- if you had a file that you created in January and updated it monthly then in August the oldest (January) file would be deleted.

O Drive - Share area The 'Share' area - is our O drive. This area is used to share data or files between all School of Nursing network users. Use it to share data that all users are allowed to see, that is do not place data here that is confidential or should be.

The O drive is not backed up as regularly as the other drives.

Police your data or files: As with all of our computing resources they are each improved with a little care and upkeep. In this sense, as you are working with your data or files - remove the ones you are certain you no longer need. If you need to backup your data from your PC, try to avoid copying Windows, Office or other applications - focus on copying just the data files. Applications can be reinstalled and in fact do not compress as easily as data files do. Following these tips will help reduce the clutter on our network drives.

Thanks and let us know if there are questions.