Hello Geography Users,

     I wanted to let you know of some ongoing changes that will be happening to the department lab computers, as well as the department T-Storage over the summer break. If you could relay this information to your students, I would greatly appreciate it! 

     We will be changing our data retention policy on lab computers in 404 and 206 going forward. Over the summer we will be removing all user accounts and user data held locally on these devices during the summer of each year. This means that students will still be able to use these lab machines as they currently do, primarily saving data locally to the hard drives. But at the end of the academic year they will be cleared. I encourage all users of these machines to take their data with them at the end of the semester. This could include moving that data to a flash drive or uploading to Google Drive or One Drive.

     Students should not store data on the department T-Storage during this move. Most user specific data on the T- Storage will be removed over the Summer as well. The Department T-Storage should be used as a way for instructors to disseminate datasets to students, but students should not use the department T-Storage to host their projects and work on those datasets. If you teach a course that would benefit from hosting projects on the T-Storage please reach out to me. This could include things like multi user group projects, or class projects like a capstone. We can likely work something out for those situations. Unfortunately we don't have the network hard drive space to support housing data for all students, although I wish we could. I encourage all users to remove any data from T-Storage that they would like to keep before the semester is over. The files in there can sometimes go back to 2018 so please take anything that you might want to see again.

I appreciate your flexibility in this move. If you have any problems getting your data off of either of these platforms, please feel free to come see me or email me and I'd be happy to help out!