Table of Contents

How much space can I request?

All RDS projects have access to unlimited research data storage at no cost. The RDMP allows you to project your storage growth over several years, which allows ICT to plan for storage increases in the future, so as to ensure your needs can be catered for. These projections are estimates only; they are not enforced storage quotas.

Is my data safe on RDS? Are there backups for data on RDS?

Numerous measures are in place to ensure your data is safe on the RDS.

Redundant hardware

The RDS itself is hosted on an enterprise-grade storage platform, which has in-built redundancy at different hardware levels. Your data is protected at a disk-level through the use of multiple RAID arrays at different levels of the RDS. This means that if individual hard drives fail within the NAS, your data is still maintained and accessible while the faulty hard drive is replaced. The accessibility of your data is also redundant, via multiple “NAS headers” (the device which a user connects to, to access the storage underneath) providing access to the disk storage. This means that even if one NAS header has a fault, you can still access your data.

Backup

The RDS data is backed up on a regular basis. Nightly backups are kept for seven days, weekly backups are kept for four weeks and monthly backups are kept for three months. In other words, data can be restored to any day within the last 7 days, or to any Sunday within the last 4 weeks, or to a pre-defined date of any month within the last 3 months.

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Disaster Recovery (DR)

The RDS service will be accessible to researchers in a disaster scenario. A disaster scenario is when the University’s data centre at Global Switch (our data centre provider) becomes unavailable. In this case, the data on the RDS service will be made available via the University’s DR data centre. RDS data is synchronised between these data centres in readiness for such an occasion. In the event of a disaster scenario there will still be minor disruption to users while the DR data centre is activated.

How do I request Research Data Store support?

For support you can call the Services team on +61 2 9351 2000, select option 2 for ICT, or log a ticket via the Services Portal.

To log a ticket:

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Please refer to the Research Data Store FAQs page of the Services Portal.