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Shared File Storage (SAN)

Shared file storage

We contract our file storage to the Faculty of Medicine.  We have use of a Virtual Server, housed in the Life Sciences Centre, which in-turn utilizes storage space on the UBC Storage Area Network (SAN).  Your file Explorer (Finder, for Macintosh users) will show some extra network hard disk drives, which are actually on the UBC SAN. We recommend that you save your documents to one of these networked drives.  You'll be able to access them from any computers on our network and the files will be backed up regularly.  You can purchase additional space for $0.45/Gb/year (Tier 2 - March 2012).

P: ("Division") drive

Program and Lab subfolders are only available to members of those programs and labs.  P: drive space has maximum use quotas, based on the number of computers and active logon accounts, in your division or lab.  If you exceed the quota, you will only be able to remove/delete files until you drop below the quota.   Please see "P:\YourDivision\# File quota limit for division #.txt" for your division or labs limit.  If you are unsure who has access, please contact Technical Support.  The "P:\AllPsych" folder contains some shared files and can also be used as a temporary storage area while transferring files between divisions.  Please delete files when you have completed transfers.

U: ("User") drive

This drive has a private folder for each account holder.  Use it as your main personal drive or to store backups of critical files, but you are limited to 600Mb of space, unless you have bought additional space.  To check your usage, start the file Explorer, right click on your directory and select properties from the drop down list.  Your U: drive folder is accessible, with your account, from any computer on the D_Psychiatry network.

File and folder names for Macintosh/Windows file sharing and backup

There are some restrictions on path and file naming. Windows and Macintosh operating systems each have "illegal" characters in file names.  Please do not use any of the following characters; 
? : / \ * < > |
Please restrict file names to 64 characters, folder names to 31 characters and full path names to 260 characters or less.  Failure to conform to these limits may make your files inaccessible to others or prevent backup/archiving of your files.

Macintosh users

After logging onto your computer, use the following steps to see shared files on the Storage Area Network.

1.  In the Finder, select “Go” then "Connect to Server" from the drop down menu.
2. Type "smb://psyt1131.psychiatry.ubc.ca" as the server address and click “Connect”.
3. Enter your D_Psychiatry user name and password.
4. Select the "Division" or "User" share and select the applicable folder from within the share.
5. Browse to your Division or D_Psychiatry user name

Once the initial connection has been made, you can connect to the "Division" or "User" folders by doing the following;

1. Open the Finder
2. On the Go menu, look under Recent Folders for "Division" or "User".

File naming conventions are important for our server maintenance and if you want to share your files with Windows computers.  Please use Windows style file extensions like the following examples;

Microsoft Word documents	*.doc
Microsoft Excel spreadsheets	*.xls
WordPerfect documents	*.wpd
Plain text files	*.txt

Microsoft (Word, Excel etc.) and Adobe (Acrobat, PageMaker etc.) products are pretty good at working reading either Macintosh or Windows formatted files. Other software manufacturers may not be so compatible.

Backup

The SAN is backed-up on the following schedule;

• All Monday to Friday file changes are kept for 10 days.
• Weekly backups are kept for six months.
• We do our own long term (we currently have files back to the late 90's) archive, twice a year.

Restoring files or folders, from the backup, can take up to 3 working days.  You may be charged ($65/hr) to restore files from a backup.

Shadow Copy

As an adjunct to our backup system, we have enabled the Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service and installed it's client on all Windows XP and Vista computers. 

File changes on P: or U: drive are temporarily saved at 7 AM and 12 Noon, each day.  The maximum space allocated to save these copies is 25Gb (5% of our SAN space).  The oldest copies will be deleted as the allocated space is used up and no more than 64 copies of any one file are kept.

You can restore files, one at a time, without our assistance:

1. Right click the file and select 'Properties'
2. Left click the 'Previous Versions' tab
3. Select the previous file version (it may take a few minutes for them all to show up) that you want, then select 'view', 'copy' or 'restore'.

Macintosh users can take advantage of this service, by logging onto a Windows computer and performing a restore with the Windows tools, as described above.