Over the last few months, we have been reviewing options to move data away from the existing old M and N drives to the cloud (mainly OneDrive and SharePoint respectively). After consulting with colleagues across the University and listening to your feedback, we are now pausing this migration, and will instead move the M and N drives to new hardware on campus. This means you will still be able to access the M and N drives as you do now and the way applications access files on them will remain the same. In the longer term we will still be migrating files to the cloud.

Why are we moving to new hardware and when will it happen?

Although the majority of data could be migrated to the cloud, there are some applications that we know either can’t be moved or where there would be changes to processes that would cause problems. We realise that many teams are already stretched and would struggle to allocate enough resources to support a large migration. The move to new hardware will begin in the first quarter of 2024 and we will provide an update with more details in the New Year.

Will I still need to move files to OneDrive and SharePoint?

At the moment you do not need to move any of your files, although we encourage you to store new files on OneDrive or SharePoint, as they support better collaboration and are easier to access wherever you are. In the longer term we will need to migrate files to the cloud, but we will only do this when we are confident all the technical issues have been overcome, and we will ensure you are consulted before this happens.

Guidance on storing data

Along with the technical aspects of this project we will be working with the Secretariat to review the guidance on where data should be stored and for how long. We will provide more information about this in the New Year.

Next update

We will provide further updates in the New Year.

In the meantime, we have various pages outlining the training and guidance available about OneDrive,  differences between using OneDrive and SharePoint for storing your work, and how OneDrive, Teams and SharePoint all work together within Microsoft 365.

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M and N drives are stored in on-campus file servers, and are only accessible when you are connected to the wired network on campus or through the Windows Virtual Desktop. The M drive is your personal file storage. You cannot share files store on your M drive, and they have a fairly small amount of storage space.
N drives are shared network drives and your access will depend on how the N drive is used within your department.