Home Drives are a service offered by ITS that provides users with network file storage that they can access anytime from on or off campus. Mac, PC, and Linux users can use this service, and the storage space is regularly backed up so that users can recover files that are accidentally deleted or overwritten.

If you were a Faculty/Staff or Student before September 13, 2022, you will have a Home Drive already provisioned.

If you are a Faculty/Staff or Student who started after September 13, 2022, Home Drives are not automatically provisioned and you will need to contact the ITS Help Desk.

You may access your Home Drive in different ways, depending on your location and the computer you are using. If you are using a computer in an Instructional Technology Center (ITC), you should automatically have access to your H: drive (on a PC) or your Home drive (on the dock on a Mac).

If you are a faculty or staff member and your workstation is in the Iowa Domain, your Home Drive will be available to you as a mapped drive (H:).

If your Home Drive does not appear, you may map a drive on your PC or Go|Connect to server on a Mac. 

The address is \\home.iowa.uiowa.edu\HawkID.

If you are off-campus, you must connect via the UI Anywhere VPN first. 

Connect through the Virtual Desktop service to connect via the web.

All faculty, staff, and students are allocated 25 GB of storage.

Quota increases can be requested at the ITS Help Desk its-helpdesk@uiowa.edu or call 384-HELP.  Please note: All requests will be assessed for appropriate business use case. Consider using OneDrive for Business - a service that is part of Office 365 if you need more than 25 GB of storage.

The Home Drive service uses HawkID authentication to ensure the security of your files. Snapshots of previous versions are available for 30 day self restores.  All files are also backed up for 6 months and kept in multiple locations on campus. 

Because we back up the data, users who accidentally delete or overwrite a file may be able to recover their data. We have directions for recovering data on a PC or on a Mac. If you have any questions about recovering data should contact the Help Desk at its-helpdesk@uiowa.edu or 384-HELP (4357).

The University of Iowa has an Acceptable Use of Information Technology policy which everyone at the University of Iowa is expected to abide by, and your Home Drive space is governed by this as well. Click here to view this document.

No.  If you require an interface to share files with others, you may do so by accessing OneDrive for Business, which is an enterprise cloud storage solution intended to provide you with an easy-to-use interface to share files with users inside and outside of this institution.

Unfortunately, this service does not provide an option to host web pages. However, MyWeb provides students with space for publishing individual, academic-related web sites, free of charge. For more information on this, please go to http://myweb.uiowa.edu.

Article number: 
2128
Last updated: 
December 9, 2022