Research Data Storage Facility

Store your research data securely over the long term.

The RDSF (Research Data Storage Facility) allows you to securely store your University research data in the medium to long-term.

Principal Investigators and academic data stewards are allocated up to 5 Terabytes (TB) of storage on the RDSF. You can use your allocation to store data from multiple research projects but you have to create a separate RDSF project for each one.

Storage above 5 TB of data

You can purchase additional data storage if you need to store more than 5TB of data.

The cost of 1TB of additional data storage in 2025 is £131.46 per year and can only be cost recovered for the duration of your research project. The charge is a TRAC (Transparent Approach to Costing) rate.

Include RDSF storage costs in your research grant application

Wherever possible, your research data storage costs should be included in your research grant application within the Research Facilities area of Worktribe.

By including data storage costs into your grant applications, you will support essential cost recovery, helping to sustain and enhance this critical service for research and teaching.

Research data storage costing guide (PDF)

Apply to use the RDSF

Where is the Research Data Storage Facility?

The RDSF is a set of disks and servers housed in two separate data centres on the University of Bristol campus, with regular back ups to tape storage both on and off site.

You can access your RDSF data from Windows, Mac or Linux.

The ACRC's HPC (High Performance Computing) systems also include the ability to keep your research data while it is needed for computation, but this data storage is not backed up and so we recommend you use the RDSF to keep a secure copy of research data which you cannot easily recreate.

For information about other data storage options at the University please see the main IT services pages about all the University filestores available to researchers.

Apply to use the RDSF

Email rdsf-help@bristol.ac.uk for support.