All members of staff have a number of mapped drives available to them for storing data. All staff will have at least the four listed below:
M: This is a personal drive, which only you have access to. Any personal documents that are not work-related may be stored here.
K: This is the divisional drive, which is accessible to all members of a department. Any work-related documents that will need to be accessed by other staff members should be stored here.
J: This is a drive shared by the whole of the UAS, housing a range of useful applications which are available for use free of charge.
R: This drive is used for cross-divisional work. Normally, you will only use this drive if you have been granted access to a particular folder.
In addition, some members of staff will have other mapped drives that are relevant to the work they are undertaking. Typically, these will be:
Y: A divisional drive for work-related spreadsheets.
P: or Q: A divisional drive for work-related databases.
L: or Z: A drive for a sub-section of a division’s work-related documents.
Other drive letters are also possible.
Recommendations
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Members of staff are advised to store data in appropriate locations. It is perhaps most important, as noted briefly above, that no work-related documents, even those in draft form, be stored in a user’s M: drive. This will help ensure that important documents are accessible to other staff within a division should the document’s owner not be available.
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By contrast, personal documents should only be stored in your M: drive.
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It is not advisable to store documents of any type, whether personal or professional, on your PC desktop, as this not only makes them unavailable to other staff, but also increases the amount of time it takes to log on and log off.
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All documents, wherever they may be stored, take up space within the UAS server environment. As the available storage is finite, try to avoid retaining unnecessary documents, such as multiple copies of the same file or old documents that are no longer required. The data stored on the UAS servers is backed up regularly and so documents can be recovered once removed if required.