Last Edit: 10/29/2018
Purpose
The network storage made available to Columbia College employees is a limited resource. Centralized electronic storage is a community resource and these policies are intended to ensure equitable usage of this shared commodity. This document provides guidance regarding what may and may not be stored in this space in order to best preserve its utility for College-related business. This storage is provided for the purpose of storing data and files related to school academic, business, and research purposes.
Definition
CCIT maintains servers on campus that provide networked file storage for College users. "Drives" or "file shares" are individual folders on those servers to which users have access. Drives generally include files directly related to Columbia College business such as Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, data archives, and other user-generated content. Drives should not contain executable programs and applications (example: files with extensions ".exe").
Storage locations provided exclusively for Columbia College users that do not reside on their individual workstations or laptops may include the following:
- Individual users' personal network drives (H:)
- The Groups drive (O:)
- The Projects drive (P:)
- The Media drive (Q:)
- The Groups2 drive (R:)
- Any location within a user's RDS profile - locations may include, but are not limited to, "Desktop", "Documents", and "Downloads"
- Any location on a remote server
This policy does not cover:
- LionMail Drive (Columbia University's deployment of Google Drive) - regardless of this policy, LionMail Drive also does not provide infinite file storage, and College users are prohibited from storing un-encrypted personally identifiable information on LionMail Drive.
Guidelines
- Network storage is intended for work-related information only. Please do not place personal information on the network shares, as it limits the storage capacity available for business-related uses. CCIT assumes no responsibility for the loss, protection, or restoration of personal data.
- If there is a need to move a large amount of data (greater than 20 GB) onto network storage, please contact ccit@columbia.edu before doing so, as additional space may need to be allocated to accommodate such a transfer.
- In the case of large amounts of media files such as photos and video, which might require terabytes of space, please contact ccit@columbia.edu to arrange for alternative storage solutions.
- Administrative staff are required to store data, information, and/or files that are created or managed as part of their work function on departmental (O and R) or project storage (P). If data is considered either critical or required for day-to-day operations to academic, administrative or research needs, then it must be stored in your departmental (O and R) or project (P) share. Your department/unit may have additional requirements on how the data is managed such as file naming conventions, structure of folders, or version retention.
- Privately identifiable information (PII) such as SSNs and credit numbers should not be stored as outlined in the University's SSN Usage Policy. Please contact CCIT at ccit@columbia.edu for guidance working with this type of data.
- Departments should periodically review and audit data in individual, groups, and project drives. Files should be deleted when no longer needed.
Files and folders should be named appropriately and uniquely for ease of management and discovery should a restoration of data be required.
Data backups of individual, departmental, and project drives are performed on a daily basis. Data can be restored as far back as 15 days from the time they were deleted or modified.
Enforcement
Users found to be in breach of the listed guidelines will be asked to remove their content from network storage. Specifically:
- CCIT reserves the right to purge data or files that are deemed to be non-compliant to these guidelines and/or pose a risk to the University and College. CCIT will always notify owners/departments before doing so.
- Upon termination or permanent leave, an individual personal network drive may be deleted after 6 months. Departments are responsible for asking this to be preserved for a longer period of time.