All students of Maastricht University have access to a personal drive with a storage capacity of 2 GB, the so-called I:drive. All applications in use within our Student Desktop automatically refer to this drive for saving your documents. No matter if you are working on a library computer or via Student Desktop Anywhere, you will always have this I:drive (My Documents) available.
On top of this, Student Portal offers additional storage capacity with the Student Portal content folder. Students can access both the I:drive and Student Portal content folder from any location, either via Student Desktop Anywhere or a via the web folder. The institutional storage services run a daily back-up and virus check.
USB sticks and external drives
User-owned storage like USB sticks and external drives are a good option for a back-up. Mind that an external drive can get damaged, lost, or stolen. And practice tells that students regularly forget to detach their USB sticks from UM computer stations and printers. Make sure to have more than one back-up of important documents. And in case you did forget your data-carrier, check how to obtain it again.
Cloud storage
Beside institutional storage capacities or bringing external back-up devices, another option is the use of cloud services like Dropbox, OneDrive, iCloud or Google Drive. Although these offer additional storage capacity, often free of charge, mind that cloud services often do not offer automatic backups. So your data might become unrecoverable in case the cloud storage gets compromised. And know that, if you store privacy sensitive data in cloud services that have their servers outside the EU, you might be breaching data protection and privacy regulations.

ICT Service Centre of Maastricht University therefore strongly advises against using any non-institutional cloud storage applications.