Skip to content

Research Drive

Overview

This is the Research Drive documentation, part of VU Tools in the A-LIFE RDM collection.

This page guides you through the Research Drive workflow — from requesting your storage space to accessing and transferring your data.

Supporting materials: Resources, FAQs
Authors: Irene Martorelli, Brett Olivier — Last modification: 2026-08-02 — Version: 0.9.0

What is Research Drive?

Research Drive (RD) is a cloud-based storage service provided by SURF1, recommended at the VU for the active storage of research data during a project.

  1. It is primarily designed for the active storage of "hot" and "warm" research data — data that is active during a research project, before publication, or shared across multiple projects.
  2. RD allows for very fine-grained sharing, making it one of the more suitable tools for collaboration between researchers both inside and outside the VU.
  3. It is a project-based cloud storage hosted by SURF — data is linked to a project, not to a specific person (unlike OneDrive). You can store and share data via browser and synchronise with various devices.
  4. RD is suitable for personal and sensitive data with classification medium. For high or above, contact a Privacy Champion or use the VU Data Storage Finder.
  5. While RD supports flexible storage for larger amounts of data, projects exceeding 500 GB incur costs. See the VU Storage Cost Model for more details.

✨ Why use Research Drive?

  • User-friendly — intuitive interface for creating, managing, and moving files and folders.
  • Ideal for collaboration — fine-grained, folder-based sharing with multiple users inside and outside the VU.
  • Secure — MFA for both login and folder sharing.
  • Institutionally supported — supported by VU University Library (UB) and the RDM support desk.
  • Multiple access options — accessible via web browser, synchronisation client, or any WebDAV-capable client.
  • Familiar interface — if you have used SURFDrive before, Research Drive will feel very familiar.

Already requested your Research Drive space?

If you have already requested your Research Drive space, you can simply jump to the next step for Organising your Space in RD.

🏁 Research Drive Workflow

Follow these steps to get started with Research Drive and manage your data throughout your project.

Step What it covers Documentation
🚀 1. Getting Started Request your Research Drive project storage space Getting Started
🗂 2. Organise your Space Structure your project folder before uploading Organise your Space
⬆ 3. Access and Transfer Data Upload and manage data via web, sync client, or WebDAV Transferring Data
👥 4. Manage Group Members Share folders and manage access for your collaborators Manage Group Members
📝 5. Documenting Add a README to describe your data — Research Drive has no metadata form Documenting
🗃 ❗ 6. Archiving and Publishing We recommend transferring data to Yoda or Zenodo for archiving and publishing data. Publishing in Yoda, Publishing in Zenodo

Research Drive is only a storage solution

❗ Research Drive is designed for active (warm) storage only. Data stored here is not preserved for the long term, does not receive a persistent identifier (DOI), and cannot be published directly.

Once your project is complete, or you want to use data stored in Research Drive for publication purposes, we recommend transferring your data to a secure archiving and publishing tool — for example Yoda or Zenodo. You can transfer data directly from Research Drive to your Yoda Research Space (we recommend Cyberduck for this). Follow our documentation listed in the workflow above on how to do this.

New to Research Drive?

If you have never used Research Drive before, you must start with Step 1 — Getting Started to request access before you can do anything else.

  1. Research Drive — storage and data management service. SURF. https://www.surf.nl/en/services/storage-data-management/research-drive ↩