During your research

Owned by Berend Dijk, van
Last updated: 19/11/2024
2 min read

How to manipulate/edit data

Edit documents

The easiest way to edit documents is in your internet browser because it allows collaborative editing (with CollabraOffice). Changes are automatically saved.

Mounting as drive on Windows / macOS

You can access Research Drive as a network drive on your PC, laptop or mobile device.
However, the native WebDAV implementation on Windows and macOS is not really great. We are not able to support this option, so we will recommend you the use of a WebDAV client or the ownCloud Desktop Client.

Look at SURF Research Drive wiki for more information

Analyse data from Research Drive

There are multiple ways that you can analyse data that are stored on Research Drive:

  • Use the OwnCloud client and run analyses on data that are stored in Research Drive as if the data were stored on your local PC.

  •  

    • Advantage: cloud synchronization

    • Disadvantage: requires sufficient disk space, synchronization may take a long time

  • Use a cloud computing service, such as Jupyter Hub (built-in Research Drive) or the LISA cluster

  •  

    • Advantage: no local copies needed, fast analysis

    • Disadvantage: mostly meant for large data analysis, may take time getting used to

  • Locally: download the data to your local PC and analyse them there

  •  

    • Advantage: no dependencies on your internet connection

    • Disadvantage: not recommended for a lot of data, no cloud synchronization, requires manual upload to Research Drive afterwards

How to work with sensitive data

A separate page is made for handling sensitive data in Research Drive.

How to restore data

SURF Research Drive does not provide backups for erroneously deleted or modified files. However, there is trash bin and versioning functionality in the application.

In case of hardware failure, SURF uses its backup service for disaster recovery; the Recovery Point Objective is 24 hours. For Leiden University, a backup service is provided by SURF. Backups are made every 24 hours.

*Presently files can/will disappear from view in minutes at the moment, they can be restored with SURF Helpdesk help, SURF is working on a solution.