Home directory (H: drive)
The College are in the process of decommissioning the H: drive. These pages are here as legacy and used for reference only. If you wish to save your personal work or study files, please use OneDrive for Business.
All students and members of staff are allocated space on the Colleges Home directory or H: drive. You can access your H: drive from any computer connected to the College network.
Access your H: drive
Find out how to access your H: drive using the online home directory finder.
If you need to access your H: Drive remotely, follow the instructions on our remote working pages.
H: drive quotas
Undergraduate students
Undergraduate students are allocated up to 4GB of secure file space each.
Staff and postgraduate students
Staff and postgraduate students are allocated up to 8GB.
Additional space
Additional H: drive space can be provided to staff at the rates in this table, subject to the approval of your Departmental IT Representative.
Costs for additional H: drive space
| Quota band (GB) | Additional cost (from base 4GB for undergraduate and service accounts) (£ per annum) | Additional cost (from base 8GB for postgraduate and staff accounts) (£ per annum) |
|---|---|---|
| 4 | Default - no charge | N/A |
| 8 | 10.00 | Default - no charge |
| 12 | 20.00 | 10.00 |
| 16 | 30.00 | 20.00 |
| 20 | 40.00 | 30.00 |
| A one-off fee of £10.00 will be levied to administer the change of each quota band request. Departments can also make a case for the quota band for an individual student to be increased and in such cases no additional fees will be charged. | ||
How to recover a deleted H: drive file
Your H: drive is backed up daily, so if you delete a file or folder you can check for a previously saved version and restore it yourself.
Instructions for recovering deleted H: drive files
Mac
- Click on the Finder icon
- Click on Go in the menu bar and select Utilities
- Choose Terminal from the window
- Type this command in the Terminal window: defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES
- Press the Return button on your keyboard
- Press the Option (alt) button on your keyboard while simultaneously clicking on the Finder icon in the dock to relaunch Finder
- Close and reopen your H: drive to see the ~snapshot folder
- Browse to the folder that corresponds to the date you wish to restore from and reopen your lost document
You may want to rename any older documents or items so that you don't overwrite items that have the same name.
Windows
- Locate the file or folder where the item you wish to restore is (the H: drive itself, for example)
- Right click on the file or folder name and select Restore previous versions
- Browse the list of Previous versions shown to find the version that corresponds to the date and time from which you wish to restore
- Highlight that version and choose Open
- Select the files or folders you wish to recover and copy them to a new folder location
You may want to rename any older documents or items so that you don't overwrite items that have the same name.
How long are backups kept?
Most requests to restore a deleted file are made within 24 hours of that file having been deleted. For that reason, backups are made more frequently during this initial 24 hour window than after it. Further backups are made with decreasing frequency for 7 days:
- Days 1—2 (last 24—48 hours): backups taken at 08:00, 12:00, 16:00, 20:00 and 00:00 are available. The exact versions that will be available to you depend on the time of day you're browsing
- Days 3—7: A single backup is available for each of these days and is taken at midnight
Recovery of files older than 7 days and younger than 90 days has to be carried out by the ICT Support team. If you can't see the previous version of a file that you need, or the file or folder is not present, contact the ICT Service Desk with:
- the folder location and filename of the file(s) or folder(s)
- the date and time it was last there