Cloud

According to the page Sharing and storing files safely sharing documents (working together) is only safe when using Workgroup folders (network shares) or Microsoft Teams (cloud storage).

Onedrive and Teams

IMPORTANT:

• data on Onedrive and Teams isn't back-upped

https://www.ru.nl/en/staff/services/services-and-facilities/ict/software/onedrive

https://www.ru.nl/en/staff/services/services-and-facilities/ict/software/teams

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/teams-connected-sites

SURFdrive: cloud storage from SURF

https://www.ru.nl/en/manuals/synchronising-surfdrive-with-files-on-your-device

IMPORTANT:

• data on SURFdrive isn't back-upped, it only provides online storage you can synchronize with on multiple clients anywhere. It is advised to backup the SURFdrive with one of the backup solutions at this wiki's Backup page.
• university policy forbids you to put critical data on SURFdrive. Read the Data Storage Policy!

URL: https://www.surfdrive.nl/en

SURF introduces SURFdrive. SURFdrive is a personal cloud storage service for the Dutch higher education and research community, offering staff, researchers and students an easy way to store, synchronize and share files in the secure and reliable SURF Community Cloud.

SURFdrive is the alternative to commercial cloud storage services like Dropbox and now available to Radboud University staff. All RU staff have up to 100 GB of secure storage on the SURF community cloud, and can share the content of this storage with other SURFdrive users as well as guest users. You can also synchronize your data on SURFdrive across multiple devices. SURFdrive is primarily intended for storing work-related files. Please do not store personal files on SURFdrive.

In the SURF community cloud, every user has a virtual drive on which files can be accessed anytime, anywhere. This personal cloud storage service has been specially developed by SURF for employees and researchers in the Dutch higher education and academic research sectors. Data is stored within Dutch borders, the users remain the owners of their own data, and SURF itself provides no information to third parties.

SURFdrive is user-friendly and accessible from any standard computer, smartphone or tablet. Files can be uploaded and shared through a simple web interface: http://www.surfdrive.nl.

Select 'Radboud University' and log in with your u-number and RU password.

To sync data on SURFdrive with data on your workstation, you need the SURFdrive client. Use the request form on http://www.ru.nl/surfdrive to request the client for your RU workstation. If you do not have a PC or laptop administered by the ISC, you can install the software yourself after downloading it from SURFdrive.

More information: https://surfdrive.surf.nl and http://www.ru.nl/surfdrive

Why and features

Why SURFdrive?

• Secure file storage
• Log in with your own user name and the password of your institution and obtain 100 GB free of charge right away.
• Anywhere access no matter where you are.
• Anywhere and anytime access to your files: from your smartphone, your tablet or your laptop.

Functionalities https://www.surf.nl/en/services-and-products/surfdrive/surfdrive.html

• offline synchronization, ensuring that users have access to their files at all times
• easy and secure file sharing within the higher education and research community
• users can invite guest users to share documents
• optimized for smartphone and/or tablet use
• 99.5% availability, with 99.9% availability from mid 2015
• 30-day deleted file recovery
• 14-day recovery of older versions of a file
• doesn't supply a backup facility, so make sure you make backups of data in your SURFdrive

SURFdrive complies with Dutch and European privacy legislation. For example, SURFdrive's conditions of use ensure safe usage, whereby users retain ownership of their own data. All data are securely stored within the Netherlands. Furthermore, SURF does not share information with third parties.

SURFdrive encrypts all data transmitted over the networks. But it doesn't support server side encryption! The Data Protection Policy therefore states that you must encrypt sensitive files when stored on SURFdrive. Critical files aren't allowed to be stored at SURFdrive even when they are encrypted!

Data on SURFdrive isn't back-upped!

SURFdrive doesn't supply a backup facility, so make sure you make backups of data in your SURFdrive.

You might think that SURFdrive is a backup facility because it gives you 30-day deleted file recovery and 14-day recovery of older versions of a file, however it isn't a decent backup for the following reasons:

• A decent backup solution would keep backups longer then 30 days.
• A decent backup solution gives you the ability to restore your whole dataset to an older backed up version. However SURFdrive doesn't support this, it only allows recovery per individual file. An example:
  • if a virus or ransomware cripples all you data in your SURFdrive, then :
    • the crippled data will be synced to all locations where you access your SURFdrive
    • you can only restore older versions per file, so you can only recover manually per file which is undoable when you have gigabytes of files
• For calamities SURFdrive has an offsite replication of all data. However just replication isn't enough for a decent backup. In case your laptop gets stolen and by coincidence there is also a fire at the data-center then your data is still stored securely on a second site. This basically means that the current version of your data is stored redundantly. But if your data is corrupted by a virus or ransomware, then it doesn't help that your corrupted data is redundantly stored on multiple sites. Backup means that you can easily restore to an older version before the corruption happened!! SURFdrive doesn't provide this.

So we can conclude:

           data on SURFdrive isn't back-upped, it only provides online storage you can synchronize with on multiple clients anywhere. It is advised to backup the SURFdrive with one of the backup solutions at this wiki's Backup page.