Home Drive Changes

Information on upcoming changes to University Home (H:) Drives

Overview

From 31st October 2023 the University will not be providing home drives to new members of staff. Students will still be provided a home drive at this stage, but it is envisaged this will change during the second half of 2024.

Why are we doing this?

For the vast majority of people OneDrive offers a superior solution for the storage of your University work files. It allows you access from anywhere, allows you to roll back to previous versions using Microsoft 365 and offers the ability to collaborate and share if you wish. OneDrive is included with the Microsoft 365 licenses that the University purchases annually.

The UniFiles platform that hosts home drives is nearing the end of it's life and will require replacement. To rationalise and minimise the cost of a replacement it is important that we stop growing the system where we can.

What if OneDrive and other storage services don't work for my use case?

The University provides a UoA Drive service which can be requested. The UoA Drive is a 15GB quota limited drive which technically is identical to a Home Drive. This request does require investigation of the use case and then approval. Staff can request a UoA Drive using this UoA Drive request form. Students will need to talk with their supervising academic staff member.

What if I have a question?

Email the project on ngatiraproject@auckland.ac.nz