What is the U Drive?

“U Drive”, a service offered by UW Seattle IT, is: “a central file storage for users, provides students, faculty and staff with a place to store files that can be accessed from anywhere, on- and off-campus.” In short, it’s 5 gigabytes of cloud storage for files available to UW students, staff and faculty. It’s enabled by default for students; faculty and staff have to turn it on first at https://uwnetid.washington.edu/manage/?service

For more information, see http://www.washington.edu/itconnect/wares/udrive/

Connecting from the Windows Lab

This should be automatic. There should be a “U:” drive already connected after you log in to Windows lab machines.

If you don’t already have a U: drive when you log in to a Windows lab machine, follow the steps for the Windows 10 virtual machine below, starting at step 3. If you’re staff or faculty, you may already have a U: drive mapped to your UW Bothell file storage, so choose a different drive letter for your Seattle U Drive. (Confusing, I know, but both campuses chose “U” as the letter for their network storage, unsurprisingly.)

If you’re a student and had used the UW Bothell-provided U: drive in the past, those files are now in the X: drive.

Connecting from the Linux Physical Lab

  1. Click on the file folder icon in the upper left, labeled “Home Folder”.
  2. Type control-l to open and put the cursor in the location bar
  3. In the location bar, type smb://udrive.uw.edu/udrive and press return
  4. If you get a login prompt, enter your UW NetID as the username, NETID as the domain, and your UW password as the password.

That’s pretty much it. There should be a “udrive” entry under “Network” in the left hand navigation pane of the file browser now.

If you want to be able to access your U drive files from a command line, you can make a symbolic link like so:

$ sftp your-uwnetid@sftp.udrive.uw.edu:udrive

You will be prompted for your UW NetID and password.

To download a file to your session, you can use this command:

sftp> get filename

To upload a file to your Udrive, you can use this command:

sftp> put filename

See the SFTP manual page for further instructions (man sftp).

Permanently Connecting from a Windows Virtual Machine

  1. Launch and log in to your virtual machine.
  2. On the Start screen, click on the Desktop icon to go to the desktop.
  3. Click on the File Explorer icon at the bottom of the screen (to the right of the Internet Explorer logo).
  4. Right-click on “Computer” in the left hand side of the file explorer and select “Map network drive…”
  5. Select “U:” for the drive letter, and enter \\udrive.uw.edu\udrive for the folder.
  6. Make sure both “Reconnect at sign-in” and “Connect using different credentials” are checked, and click “Finish”.
  7. Enter “NETID\your_netid” (use your own NetID, not “your_netid”, obviously) as the username, and enter your UW password in the password field.
  8. Make sure “Remember my credentials” is checked, and click “OK”.

You now have a U: drive connected to your U Drive space in Seattle.