Improvements include a more reliable and robust interface and the addition of finer grained controls, allowing you to decide who receives what notification emails (if any at all).

There’s also much more detail in reporting and an audit log is now available to senders.

And, there’s another new feature we’re quite excited about: full end-to-end encryption for FileSender, assuring nobody (not even AARNet) except you and your recipient ever see the plaintext file.

For those of you who are power users / heavy load shippers, the good news is the upgrade fixes the following bugs that recently reared their heads:

• Large file uploads stalling
• Uploads failing file size checks after upload

What are CloudStor users saying?

Dr Sabin Zahirovic, Postdoctoral Research Associate, School of Geosciences, Faculty of Science, University of Sydney:

“Everything, from the new functionality, to the stability, and the design of the interface, highlights to me that the team working on this have listened to feedback, and have gone above and beyond to provide a superior product.”

Dr Zahirovic is a member of the EarthByte group leading a large project that is designed to transform the way Earth processes are modelled. The project works with huge geospatial datasets that transcend spatial and temporal scales, and even larger model outputs with high spatial and temporal resolution in 4D.

CloudStor has enabled the efficient transfer of these enormous datasets between national and international partners, which, he says, has strengthened collaborations and accelerated knowledge discovery from the data and model outputs.

“I have not come across any platform that comes even close to the functionality and speed of the CloudStor service, especially with all the new features launched this November (2016). The FileSender facility is an integral part of our research. If we did not have this tool and facility, our research and collaboration would really suffer. Your hard work enables our science, and it is a very important factor.”

What is CloudStor?

CloudStor is a file sharing and storage service designed and built by AARNet to support data-intensive research collaborations. It is an on-net service for AARNet-connected institutions, providing individual researchers with 100GB free storage and group quotas available on request.

CloudStor has grown from a sandbox experiment thrown together with 20 users, to a production service with over 28,500 users today and universities asking to store hundreds of terabytes or even petabytes within the system.