H: Drive is no longer a supported service. Access to your H: Drive will be fully removed on Friday 12 April. 

These pages are here as legacy and used for reference only. If you wish to save your personal work or study files, please use OneDrive for Business

Access your H: drive

Find out how to access your H: drive using the online home directory finder.

If you need to access your H: Drive remotely, follow the instructions on our remote working pages.

 

How to recover a deleted H: drive file

Your H: drive is backed up daily, so if you delete a file or folder you can check for a previously saved version and restore it yourself.

Instructions for recovering deleted H: drive files

Mac

  • Click on the Finder icon
  • Click on Go in the menu bar and select Utilities
  • Choose Terminal from the window
  • Type this command in the Terminal window: defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES
  • Press the Return button on your keyboard
  • Press the Option (alt) button on your keyboard while simultaneously clicking on the Finder icon in the dock to relaunch Finder
  • Close and reopen your H: drive to see the ~snapshot folder
  • Browse to the folder that corresponds to the date you wish to restore from and reopen your lost document

You may want to rename any older documents or items so that you don't overwrite items that have the same name.

Windows

  • Locate the file or folder where the item you wish to restore is (the H: drive itself, for example)
  • Right click on the file or folder name and select Restore previous versions
  • Browse the list of Previous versions shown to find the version that corresponds to the date and time from which you wish to restore
  • Highlight that version and choose Open
  • Select the files or folders you wish to recover and copy them to a new folder location

You may want to rename any older documents or items so that you don't overwrite items that have the same name.

How long are backups kept?

Most requests to restore a deleted file are made within 24 hours of that file having been deleted. For that reason, backups are made more frequently during this initial 24 hour window than after it. Further backups are made with decreasing frequency for 7 days:

  • Days 12 (last 2448 hours): backups taken at 08:00, 12:00, 16:00, 20:00 and 00:00 are available. The exact versions that will be available to you depend on the time of day you're browsing
  • Days 37: A single backup is available for each of these days and is taken at midnight

Recovery of files older than 7 days and younger than 90 days has to be carried out by the ICT Support team. If you can't see the previous version of a file that you need, or the file or folder is not present, contact the ICT Service Desk with:

  • the folder location and filename of the file(s) or folder(s)
  • the date and time it was last there