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Sunet Drive - Introduction

Welcome to the wiki-pages of Sunet Drive. Here, you fill find general information about Sunet Drive, both conceptual and technical. Feel free to post your questions in the stream, if there is anything you want to know. The list of all wiki-articles can be found in the index.

Sunet Drive in a nutshell

Sunet Drive is a national data storage and collaboration platform with the goal to simplify the handling of research data. There are several components, that make up Sunet Drive:

  • The frontend is based on a Nextcloud, so most of the daily tasks you perform will be handled either by the webinterface of Nextcloud or the corresponding sync-clients. Whenever you want to collaborate with someone on your data, it will be done through Nextcloud.
  • The storage backend is based on S3-buckets, which are logical storage entities comparable to hard disks. Buckets are handled by your local institution and the idea is to create buckets for research projects, institutions and so on. The lifecycle of a bucket can easily be handled beyond the lifetime of a regular research project, and the ownership of a bucket can be transferred. In Nextcloud, buckets will be shown as regular folders.
  • Your login and identity is handled by “your organization” through the SWAMID-federation and your login is directed to a federated Nextcloud node that is mapped to your institution.

Sunet Drive Production and Test

If you are, like many others, curious how Sunet Drive looks like, head over to Sunet Drive or Sunet Drive Test and log in using your institution. If you do not have an institutional account, create an eduid.se account and log on through that. Sunet Drive Test has the same architecture as Sunet Drive with a few limitations, mainly that it should not be used for production data and that you can expect occasional downtime during upgrades.

Nextcloud User Documentation

Most users will use Sunet Drive through its native Nextcloud client applications. The first thing you might want to check is the Nextcloud user manual, which includes documentation for the Nextcloud Desktop Client and Nextcloud Android App (which is very similar to the iOS app). Please be aware that there might be some differences between the Nextcloud documentation and the implementation of Sunet Drive.

Remember to ask your questions in the stream, in case you cannot find the information here in the wiki.