Netfiles For Departments

General Information
Requesting Space
Using the space
Important Note About File Recovery

General Information

The space is part of the 5 GB/staff of storage OIT is offering to the college or college level equivalent business units. We use the org chart at www.irr.umn.edu to sort out the units. We can present the space in either netfiles or active directory or both. The process is a little different in AD, this page describes how the space will be handled in NetFiles.

A college or college level equivalent business unit will have its own root folder in NetFiles and will have the ability to create new folders within that root folder. The goal is for OIT to provide the space to the college level unit and for the unit to control the allocation of that space within the college.

Requesting Departmental Space

1. Requests for space should be made to netfiles@umn.edu.
2. We will determine what college equivalent unit the request is part of.
3. If that unit has space already we refer the request to the administrator of the space for the college level unit.
4. If not we send the requester a space request form, which has to be approved by someone at the college unit level (dean, IT director, etc).
5. When we get the form back we create a new root folder in netfiles for that college level unit, /oit for example, and make the person(s) designated on the form the administrator of that space.
6. That person with administrative rights can then create folders within that folder and set the appropriate permissions and quotas on the subfolders.

Using the Space

When the new root folder is created only the administrators designated on the request form will have access to the space. To access the space they can clisk on the Root/ link in the bookmarks list on the left frame in the web based user interface. The new folder for the department will appear on the list of directories. The space can be used in several different ways, the following a just suggestions for how the space can be set up.

If the space will be used for specific groups or projects within your college the following might work well for your unit.

Set your new root folder to be readable by "Authenticated Users", but be sure to apply the change to the folder only.

Then for each project or group in the college that wants to use some of the college's netfiles space, create a new subfolder for the project. For example, if Athena Guru - a faculty member of your department, wants a space in netfiles for share and collaborating on documents for her example research project. Administer rights for the folder can then be given to the person requesting the space, and she can set up the rest of the permissions. To prevent one project from using more than the expected amount of space the primary administrator (owner) of the college's root folder can set quotas on sumbfolder in the college's space by clicking on the manage icon for the folder and then the quota link.

Click here to watch a folder being set up as described above.

Alternatively, no rights could be granted at the departmental root level and the individual project folders could be accessed by the links, or searching within netfiles. Rights to a subfolder do not depend on rights to the parent folder. Once the folder is found the first time it can be easily bookmarked within the netfiles interface by clickin the add bookmark icon .

If the space will be used more broadly by your unit, a top down approach to permissions may be preferred.

Important Note About File Recovery

When any file is deleted from your departmental space it will go to a trash folder in the root directory. By default this directory will inherit permissions from the root folder when the first files in deleted in the space. It is recommended that the rights to the trash folder are limited. If someone deletes a file from the trash folder it is not recoverable. Files with sensitive information that are deleted in another folder will move to the trash folder as well. For these two reasons it is necessary to limit access to the trash to staff that need to recover files that were accedently deleted (and thus moved to trash) and those who can PERMANENTLY delete files by deleting them from the trash folder. Alos note that the trash folder is a sub folder of the departments root folder so appying a permission change and applying it to all files and subfolders will also apply it to trash. You may need to restrict the permission on trash again after making such changes at the root level.