Research Support Handbook

How does SciStor work?

last modified

March 5, 2026

SciStor is VU Amsterdam’s on-premises scientific storage solution, designed for active research data management. It provides structured, permission-controlled storage with built-in data protection for research teams operating under VU Amsterdam’s faculty structure.

Naming Convention

All Project Folders must adhere to the following format:

FAC-DPT-PRJ

Where:

  • FAC: denotes the faculty abbreviation

  • DPT: the department abbreviation

  • PRJ: the project name abbreviation.

For example, a Computer Science project within the Faculty of Sciences would be named BETA-CS-PRJ1.

Data Protection

Snapshots

SciStor provides point-in-time snapshots of stored data at no additional cost. Snapshots enable file versioning and recovery without requiring separate backup infrastructure.

Frequency Retention period
Daily 1 week
Weekly 4 weeks

The Data Recovery page explains how you can restore data from the snaphots yourself.

Note

Upon deletion of a file, the corresponding snapshot will continue to consume storage space until the snapshot retention period expires. Storage capacity is not immediately reclaimed following deletion.

Failover System

SciStor operates a replication-based failover system in which data from the primary on-campus node is continuously mirrored to a secondary node located off-campus. In the event of a major infrastructure incident, the secondary node ensures data availability and integrity.

Project Folder Structure

Access control in SciStor is organised across two levels.

Level 0 — Main Folder is automatically provisioned for all users with read-only permissions. This ensures that all team members can locate and navigate to the Project Folder.

Level 1 — Subfolders allow granular, per-folder access control. Each subfolder may be assigned one of the following permission levels:

Permission Description
R Read-only access
RW Read and write access

Example Structure

/BETA-CS-PROJECT1/        [RW: Root;   R: vunet1, ..., vunetN]
├── raw_data/             [RW: vunet1, vunet2;   R: vunet3, ..., vunetN]
├── processed_data/       [RW: vunet1, ..., vunetN;   R: —]
├── analysis/             [RW: vunet1, ..., vunetN;   R: —]
└── results/              [RW: vunet1, ..., vunetN;   R: —]