I’m graduating and leaving Geography, what do I need to do?
Some of these accounts are provisioned and de-provisioned by Geography, others by UCSB.
The following dates generally start at your separation from the University (last employed day, graduation date)
UCSB Connect Email account / UCSB Gmail / Geography Email account (not alias)
- Student – active for 13 months after you graduate (as your UCSBnetID is valid for 13 months)
Below we have compiled a list of deadlines and best practices for the current graduating class. Please read over the following as you prepare to leave Geography and it’s computing infrastructure behind.
If you aren’t able to read this entire note, the two things that are most important are:
- Changing where your @geog.ucsb.edu email address forwards to (point the alias to your personal account)
- Getting a copy of your files from the shared servers before you leave Geography.
Computer Accounts
- Geography Windows Desktop accounts automatically close and your desktop is reimaged for the next incoming grad student.
Account Data
- Make sure you have permission for any datasets you might take (in case you had NDA data on your group project etc.).
- Your account is closed after you leave, your data is then moved to an archived location for a year, then permanently deleted.
- If possible, please delete any large data-sets in your folders that aren’t needed any longer.
uMail Accounts
- You retain access to your uMail/Connect account for 13 months after the end date of your last quarter.
- We recommend you forward or transfer emails you wish to have for future use before your account expiry date.
- Under some circumstances you can request an uMail account extension.
UCSBnetID
- After graduation converts to uMail only at the end of your graduating quarter.
- A uMail only UCSBnetID will only work for accessing uMail, you won’t be able to use campus wireless or access library resources etc.
Your Website
- You may want to look into an alternate hosting platform. There are a few to choose from. First I would suggest for you to look into obtaining a domain name that represents you and your work. This can come with hosting, and or you can choose a separate hosting company.
You are free to search online for a domain registration and hosting plan of your choice.
- Then, copy over your website to the new hosting site and set the Title to your new domain name.
Next, you can login to meridian and remove all of your content in your public_html folder and add in a index.html file that will automatically redirect the website to your new website address.
- Instructions with several examples on how to create an index.html file to redirect your website can be found at
https://www.w3docs.com/snippets/html/how-to-redirect-a-web-page-in-html.html
- Then let us know when you are done and we can close your LDAP account.
Geography Email Address
- Your @geog.ucsb.edu email address will need to be moved from your @ucsb.edu connect Gmail account after graduation to your personal email address of choice.
- If you do not provide a forwarding address before your @ucsb.edu connect Gmail account is deactivated (13 months after graduation) emails sent to your @geog.ucsb.edu email address will be lost.
- After your email is forwarded you will only be able to receive email sent to your @geog.ucsb.edu email address at the address you provided; you will not be able to send email from your @geog.ucsb.edu email address.
Continuing at Geography
- If you are continuing at Geography let us know so we can transition or extend your account / building access and minimize interruption. (Examples: Becoming a PhD student, Working with a research group).
For departing students; getting your digital assets before your accounts close:
You have 13 months to save or transfer your Google and Box digital assets. We recommend you don’t delay this process.
We are recommending that you move your digital assets to cloud storage rather than a USB disk drive. Cloud storage has an annual cost ranging from $25 a year for 100 GB to $100 a year for 1000 GB or 1 Terabyte. We believe Google Drive might be the easiest and least expensive cloud storage to use if you aren’t already paying for cloud storage. Some people may want to move their files to a USB drive, but its important to realize that hard drives fail and are less resilient than cloud storage.
Geography servers Parallel R Drive (Student User Folder) and Meridian (Student Folder) – We recommend you audit how much storage you are using on both servers and assess whether you need the gigabytes of files you have. Login to a desktop at Geography and remotely to parallel or (any research group windows server you may have data on) and run windirstat (just click Start and then type “windirstat“). Run it on the drive where your folder exist first to audit how you are using your disk storage. Delete any files that you don’t need, and empty your Recycle bin on your desktop. This narrows down the amount of storage you need to copy to the cloud.
Action – identify which folders to keep, drag and drop to your cloud storage. You can also copy files to an external drive connected to a Geography Desktop.
UCSB Google Account you can easily transfer your email messages and Google Drive files to a personal google account using the google takeout process. We recommend you assess how much storage you are using in both accounts to determine if you need to purchase more storage in your google account before starting the google takeout process. You can also save/download your Google content in the takeout process (but this might be less convenient and take more time).
- Google Suite / Connect accounts for students aren’t clearly documented. It would be best to treat them like your UCSBnetID or uMail account and be ready for them to go away after 13 months.
Warning: files that were shared with you, won’t be copied in the takeout/transfer process. If you want to keep those files, you should review in Google Drive “Shared with me” and make copies of any files you want to keep. (select file or files, then right click and make a copy).
Action –
- Find out how much storage you are using and with what services : https://drive.google.com/settings/storage
- Do the same for your personal Google account
- If you need more storage in your personal Google account purchase more
- Perform the google takeout process to copy mail / drive storage / etc from your UCSB account to your personal account (we recommend you do a transfer rather than download/create archive) – https://myaccount.google.com/privacy#takeout
Box Account – a free / individual box account offers 10 GB of storage (as of June 2019) (picture -> account settings -> Storage used) . If your UCSB box account has less than that, it is very easy to transfer ownership of your folders / files to your personal account. There has been “an expectation” that you can convert your UCSB Box account to a personal account with a 50GB storage allocation; as of June 2019, the department that handles the service isn’t able to do this (we’ve asked).
Action – If your storage is less than 10GB,
- create a personal free Box account (box.com) try in firefox
- UCSB box: Move all the folders you own into a single folder (ucsb.box.com) try in chrome (just a different web browser)
- UCSB box: Share that folder with your personal account
- UCSB Box: Change the ownership of the folder to your personal account
Watch this video if it doesn’t make sense
If you have folders shared with you that you want to keep, you can download the content and re-upload it to a personal folder on your account. There is no way to copy or duplicate shared folders within Box.
