A variety of services are available for storing and sharing files. These are described in the sections below.
SMB
The Physics Department provides SMB service for secure file storage and sharing. Windows, Mac, and Linux are supported. For more information, see here.
AFS
The Physics Department provides AFS service for secure file storage and sharing. Windows, Mac, and Linux are supported. For more information, see here.
Google Drive / Backup and Sync / File Stream
Google Drive provides unlimited storage to all UW faculty, staff, and students. Like Box, this can be used to back up a folder from your computer and can sync files between multiple devices. A useful feature is Google Docs, which provide word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation editors in your web browser. Multiple people can edit the same document at the same time if you give them access. This can be useful when working with remote collaborators on proposals, reports, papers, etc. To get started, go here. When downloading a Google Drive app to your computer, consider choosing Google’s Backup & Sync, which can be used to backup additional folders from your computer as well as the Google Sync folder.
Box
Box.com provides 50GB of storage to all UW faculty, staff, and students. Files can be shared with others and can be synchronized between multiple computers. Files can also be created and edited in your browser using online versions of Microsoft Office and Google Docs. Faculty can get a project directory for cases where that makes more sense than storing files in their personal area. To get started, see here.
Research Drive
UW provides 5TB of free storage per PI through a service called Research Drive. We don’t yet have performance comparisons to external cloud storage and department storage options, but we expect that when accessed from the campus, read/write speeds to Research Drive should be higher than to cloud services such as Google or Box and may also exceed the performance of the department SMB and AFS services.
Overleaf
For collaborating on papers with the full power of LaTeX, Overleaf is a very convenient service. The free offering provides 1GB of file storage. Features include multiple people simultaneously editing, each with a choice of working as they desire in the LaTeX source, rich-text, or WYSIWYG editors. All of this is presented through your web browser, so no special software needs to be installed on your computer.
GitHub
For collaborating and publishing source code and other projects that benefit from a full-fledged revision control system, GitHub is a very popular service. The free personal account provides unlimited public repositories. Each research group in the Physics Department is also entitled to the free team plan.