The South Australian Sustainable Repository (SASR) is an eResearch SA data management project set up to serve all researchers connected with one of South Australia's three universities. It offers researchers a streamlined approach to managing, storing, and sharing data.

It is freely available for moderate use and is provided at the cost of hardware and media for higher use.

Whether you are handling very large data files or lots of smaller ones, SASR can help you:

• store your data using reliable, professionally-maintained storage systems
• back-up large amounts of data
• integrate your data with related national or international data repositories
• publish your data so it can be easily discovered and accessed
• maintain continuity of access in the event you move between institutions
• enable data sharing across distributed locations
• simplify the data archiving process.

Transferring data to the SASR repository is easy; once you have a SASR account it is simply a matter of dragging and dropping your files into the SASR network drive on your desktop or laptop computer. There is a SASR node located at each of the three universities and these pass your data to the central SASR repository at eResearch SA. Automated tools for transferring or synchronising your data between different storage systems are also available.

Your account is password protected and your data securely stored. When you set up your SASR account, you can specify how access to your data should be defined. You can:

• have sole access rights
• share access with the rest of your research team
• share access with a group within your research team
• make your data accessible to anyone in the world.

Your data is also portable. If at any point you move to another South Australian university, your data will still be accessable from your new institution's SASR repository node. If you move to another institution outside South Australia, your data can be easily transferred to your new location.

How do we store and backup your data?

When you send your data files to SASR through the network drive on your local computer, they are stored on a RAID.

A RAID is a fast and reliable data storage device that consists of several disks organised in an array. This delivers increased data security: if one disk in the array develops a hardware problem, your data is safely stored on the other disks and nothing is lost. You can also keep working while a replacement disk is sourced and installed.

RAID storage is an excellent solution if you need to access your data regularly and rapidly.

If you also arrange for SASR to backup your data, we save a copy of the data on your RAID to tape, a data storage device suited to secure long-term storage.

'Snapshots' of the data on your RAID are taken at daily intervals, then migrated to tape. At any one time, a week's worth of daily snapshots are retained by SASR for you to access if you need to. Depending on how much tape storage you have and how often your data changes, you may have many more snapshots available.

To recover files from backup, you simply need to contact the eResearch SA Helpdesk. We will let you know what files are available and copy them back to the RAID so you can continue working.

Archiving your data

You can also talk to eResearch SA about archiving large amounts of data that you no longer want to access regularly, but need to keep for the long-term.

When you archive your data with SASR, you no longer need to worry about sorting through multiple hard drives, USB drives, or archive boxes; your archived files are centrally located together, and visible from the network directory on your local computer.

Because archived data needs to be secure for the long-term but accessed infrequently, it is also stored on tape. Tapes are less expensive than RAIDs, making them more cost efficient if you need to keep very large amounts of data. It takes signficantly longer to retrieve a file from tape, so this method is not suitable for data that you want to access regularly.

Should you need to retrieve archived data, the process is simple; all you need to do is select the file you want from your network drive, double click on it to open, and wait for the tape robot to retrieve it.

Get started

To find out more about what SASR can offer you and your research team, contact the eResearch SA Service Desk.

We can explain more about the SASR service, answer your questions, and set you up with an account.

Once you are on board, refer to SASR Help for more information about how to connect.