St. Olaf primarily relies on Google Drive and Google Shared Drives for networked storage space for use by students, faculty, and staff. For some use cases, St. Olaf also provides two additional on-campus file storage locations (described below). This storage space is accessible from all college-owned computers on campus and may also be accessed from a personal computer.
Shared or S: Drive
The “Shared” or S: drive are shared directories used by groups of people to share files. Access to a particular shared directory is typically limited to a group of a few users.
On Macs, you will see an icon labeled ‘shared‘. Within ‘shared’ you will see any shared directories to which you have been granted access.
On PCs, shared directories appear as the S: drive in My Computer.
Prime or P: Drive
The “Prime” or P: drive contains installations and applications. Users have read-only access to these applications and installers. This directory contains a couple of sub-directories:
- Apps – applications
- Installs – application installers and drivers
On Macs, you will see an icon labeled ‘prime’.
On PCs, the Prime volume is mapped to the P: drive in My Computer.
How to Access On-Campus File Storage
Windows
- From a St. Olaf computer, open File Explorer. If you are off-campus, please start your VPN first (see the Related Articles section on this page, if you need to setup your VPN). We encourage you to consult local laws before using the St. Olaf VPN when outside the US.
- From a personal computer, follow the instructions here.
Mac OS
Please follow the instructions here.
Backups and Restores
The network file storage is backed up nightly and in most cases, a document that is accidentally deleted can be recovered from backup. If you need a recovery performed, please fill out the File Recovery Request form.