RDIM Frequently Asked Questions CloudStor Decommissioning

CloudStor Decommissioning

AARNet has announced that it will be decommissioning its CloudStor services (Sync & Share, SWAN, & S3) on Friday, 15-Dec-2023. It's likely that every university and research organisation in Australia will be impacted by AARNet's decision. More details can be found at https://support.aarnet.edu.au/hc/en-us/articles/5697089309711

What do I need to do?

Read the Getting my data from CloudStor and Alternative Storage and Transfer Solutions sections below for direction on what to do next.

Contact Pauline Lawrey (eResearch Analyst, eResearch Centre) on pauline.lawrey@jcu.edu.au or 07 4781 6221 if you have any concerns or need assistance.

Cartoon listing steps to deal with the CloudStor decommissioning: Review data, find alternative solutions below, move or delete data, ask for help if necessary.

Getting my data from CloudStor

Do not leave this until the last minute. Once CloudStor is shutdown there is no guarantee of data recovery. 

Think about

Whether you have shared any files or folders with other people and any websites or documents that may need updating once your data has been moved.

Note:  This will not include any Zoom Recordings or files shown in the Shared with you menu option page.

Your data will not be sent to you immediately, the time delay will depend on the demand on the servers.

When you have downloaded your data or no longer require your CloudStor user account, you can use the Delete My Account option in the CloudStor browser interface but please read the AARNet documentation first.

Use Cyberduck or some other application that supports WebDav,  see AARNet's support document for more information on how to do this. Cyberduck is free and easy to use.  AARNet's document lists other applications that can be used.

This is the most immediate method.

Sync your files to your computer's hard drive using their desktop client, see AARNet's support document for this process.

AARNet disabled the ability to download folders from their browser interface a while back. You will need to use one of the following options.

Alternative Storage and Transfer Solutions

Here are alternative solutions for some common usages of CloudStor. Find the one(s) that suit your needs and move your data. If these alternatives do not suit your needs or you don't feel confident moving your data yourself, please contact Pauline by any of the methods listed earlier. Do not leave this until the last minute. Once CloudStor is shutdown there will be no data recovery possible.

Alternatives and How Tos

If you are sharing files or folders via a permanent link (URL) into your allocation, please contact Pauline Lawrey for assistance.

OneDrive can be used for making files available to people external to JCU as well as internal JCU staff and students. Each student and staff member has a 5 TB allocation available to them without needing to request it. See the JCU Guide and also Microsoft's Restrictions and limitations in OneDrive and SharePoint.

To started with OneDrive on your system, see these Knowledge Base search results and look for your system (MacOS, Windows, etc.).

AARNet FileSender is not being decommissioned, you can use CloudStor FileSender in your web browser to send files and folders from your local device to another person. You can send up to 1,000 files at a time, with a combined maximum size of  2 PB per upload. AARNet has not comprehensively tested uploads of this size.

NOTE: OneDrive does not have the ability to set automatic link expiries but FileSender does.

OneDrive is the perfect place for storing your non-research data work files. You can sync the folders or files you are working on to your laptop or desktop so that you always have an up-to-date version of your work in the cloud and on your local hard drive. This protects you from the effects of hard drive crashes and even from accidental deletion to some extent, see the OneDrive for Business guide.

Personal files should not be stored on JCU data storage systems. You can get free personal data storage very easily from:

These providers also have subscription pricing to access larger storage volumes. There are also specialist paid services for photos and videos.

Please copy the files you wish to retain into your own personal storage.

30 GB or less

If you are the only person working with this data then please download your data from CloudStor and upload it into your OneDrive account.

See the section on Downloading data from CloudStor.

Everyone else

Please contact the eResearch Centre to discuss where is most suitable for your data. We will organise the transfer of these larger data sets.

The ARDC Jupyter Notebook Service gives Australian researchers access to the popular Jupyter Notebooks via a simple web portal. It’s an easy way for researchers to develop and share software, and combine software code, computational output, explanatory text and multimedia resources in a single location.

The new service is available via a simple web interface, giving researchers access to compute and storage resources, provided by the ARDC Nectar Research Cloud. The new national service is hosted in the cloud, so multiple researchers can develop and serve Jupyter Notebooks with centralised monitoring, logging and reporting.

It also supports launching Jupyter Notebooks within a pre-configured computing environment without the need for users to install any software packages.

Learn more ...

Please log in to CloudStor and check if you have any data stored there that you want to retain.

CloudStor uses the Australian Access Federation (AAF) login. Select James Cook University from the list and you will be directed to our standard single sign on (SSO) login. Once you are in, you will see a menu on the left hand side.

Image of the left hand side menu of a CloudStor account after login

From here you can check if you have shared any data and any links (public or private) that you may have created into the data.

If you have created links and they need to be supported in the changeover to a new system, please contact Pauline Lawrey for assistance.

If you have some data in your allocation but do not need to move it elsewhere then see the section titled I've moved my data from CloudStor.

If you have data in your allocation and do need to retain it then please see the other options on this page for directions.

You will need to do future exports to your local machine and then copy/move them into wherever you are storing the rest of your project's research data.

Any content that you have currently stored in CloudStor should be stored with the rest of your project's research data. See the Research Data options for alternatives if all of your project data is in CloudStor.

As part of our migration strategy all JCU CloudStor accounts are now read-only. No new data can be loaded into any CloudStor accounts but you can still access the data that was already there.