BOX.com

Recently, Purdue's Office of Research and Partnerships collaborated with Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP) to provide a new data storage resource for the Purdue research community. Purdue researchers now have access to Box, a cloud-based storage service that allows investigators to store and share data. HRPP/IRB will accept protocol applications that make use of Box as an acceptable means to store research data. However, please be aware that any storage of Protected Health Information (PHI) covered under including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) or the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH), or storage of other data with specific access parameters, will require special account set-up through ITaP prior to data storage.  Contact rcac-help@purdue.edu  to start the process.

Note that ITaP and other campus units are currently exploring the possibility of storage options for data covered under additional regulations (e.g., export controlled data).

To access Box, use your Purdue Career Account login at https://purdue.account.box.com/

For general storage, a folder called "Getting Started with Box" is provided to help users learn how to use the Box service.

IMPORTANT:  Data stored at Box must comply with Purdue data guidelines, available at: https://www.purdue.edu/securepurdue/data-handling/electronically-stored-information.php

Box is a convenience, but has to be used with care to prevent inadvertent exposure of institutional or research data.

Examples of use cases include:

Securely sharing data with an Industry collaborator
(NOTE: If you need to work with regulated data, you MUST contact ECN and RCAC for these situations, so that the folders can be set up with appropriate security settings). Currently HIPAA and FERPA are supported regulations. NIST 800-171 is not currently supported but is under review.

See https://www.rcac.purdue.edu/storage/reedfolder/

If you are a graduating student and want to easily leave a copy of your data with your advisor
If you are dealing with data sets that you need to have access to, either slowly or infrequently
If you need versioning of a document
If you need a space to keep all your cat pictures and videos (speaking from personal experience -sundeep)
 

Box I/O is not fast - that means, it is NOT suitable for storage that needs to be accessed or written to from data collection machines, or for number crunching directly. One way of thinking about it is that it is not a replacement for PURR, DataDepot, or your departmental homeServer.
see http://eng.purdue.edu/jump/ba78d5 for details)

Box is NOT archival. Unlike PURR or ECN storage, you cannot ask to retrieve it past 30 days after the file has been removed.

Deleted files in BOX are kept in the Trash folder.  Items in the Trash Folder can be restored until they are permanently deleted which occurs 90 days from the original deletion date.

If you have questions, please either drop us a note: www.purdue.edu/ecn/contactus or send an email  to rcac-help@purdue.edu

How to use Box for collaborating on Microsoft Office Documents (Word, Excel, Powerpoint)

Please see https://community.box.com/t5/Organizing-and-Tracking-Content/Accessing-Version-History/ta-p/50452 for information about version history and revisions using Box. In the Version History tab, it will list each version of the file.

If you need to revert changes: you can select one of the older versions and click on "Make Current". This creates a new version without the changes from the previous version (it also keeps a copy of the previous version).

If you have more than one person opening a file:
With a standard SMB share, if someone tries to open a file that is already opened, a notification pops up that that file is already open and by whom. For Box.com, we recommend opening files in Microsoft Online (requires logging in through the Office 365 portal). At the top of the screen, it will show you who else has opened the file. It will also show you them editing the file in real time (you will see their cursor in the file). Once you are both done making changes, it will save the new version.