Last Updated: 15 Sep 2015

1. Private and shared storage

   Anything you store on your H: drive or the share drive S: will be automatically backed up daily by Computer Services. They keep backups for 90 days.

2. C: or D: (hard disk) drive

   Computer Services intentionally does not support backing up data on these drives. The C: drive is considered to be easily replaceable in case of failure. This policy lowers their cost of ownership of the hundreds of computers they control on campus, thereby keeping campus operational costs down.

   Therefore, anytime that they want to upgrade your operating system, it would be in your best interests to make sure you have a backup made of any data you have stored on those hard disk drives. For megabytes worth of data, you can put it on your H: drive, burn it to a CD/DVD disc, copy it to a USB flash/thumb drive, or put in in the cloud (e.g., Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive for Business).

   Unless you own a tape drive, gigabytes worth of data are best placed on another hard drive -- contact lab staff: we may have some temporary hard disk space available.

3. Retention of information

   Please note that nearly everything we record by any means may be a matter of public record. There is a University of Washington policy on how long we need to retain certain information.

Change Log

15 Sep 2015	Updated links and added flash drive, CD/DVD burning, and cloud storage as places to backup files.
23 Oct 2002	Original document