Research Data Glacier

ACER has partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the UIC Library to provide the research community with the Research Data Glacier. This resource is an archival storage space available to UIC faculty members whose research is enabled through federally funded grants. The storage is hosted on Amazon’s S3 Storage, to provide a low cost, long term storage solution for data that needs to be archived post-publication to meet the data retention and sharing requirements of NIH and other federal research grants.  This service is also integrated with the UIC library’s INDIGO repository to facilitate the sharing of data with other researchers.

Notable features:

  • Very low cost – $12/TB/year
  • Long term, secure, durable
  • Unlimited capacity
  • Hosted at secure, off-site locations with replication
  • Secure storage for HIPAA data available in fall 2023

Please note, at this time the preservation storage option is only available for federal grant-funded research projects. Because this is "cold" storage, it can take 12-48 hours to retrieve and download data on this storage system. This storage is most appropriate for data from concluded projects that need to be archived for several years to meet the data retention and sharing requirements of NIH and other federal research grants.  The costs for this service are subject to an annual review, as pricing from Amazon is subject to change.

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UIC faculty may use this storage for archiving data from federally-funded research such as NIH or NSF grants.

The minimum length of storage is 7 years, but more years may be purchased at the time of request. A notification will be sent out in advance of the expiration of the storage time period with renewal options. At that time, if a researcher does not wish to keep their data in Preservation storage they may transfer it to the storage service of their choosing. If the storage service period is not renewed or data is not transferred, it will e deleted from the system after sufficient warning.

No, the storage has been configured so that you may use your UIC NetID and password to access the storage via sftp client rather than create an AWS account. More information on this process may be found in the ACER Knowledge Base.

Data stored in Preservation storage is in ‘cold’ storage which means it is offline and inaccessible until a retrieval is requested in the AWS system.

If a researcher wishes to access their own data they may email acer@uic.edu, providing  the dataset DOI from INDIGO to request access. An ACER staff member will start the retrieval process and data will become available in 12-48 hours through a download link or sftp.

For a requestor that is not a dataset author (i.e. an non-UIC researcher or another UIC researcher), they may search INDIGO for the data record following the instructions in the dataset record description for requesting, and then email acer@uic.edu with the dataset DOI and evidence of approval (i.e. email from dataset author). An ACER staff member will start the retrieval process and data will become available in 12-48 hours through a download link.