Your files can stay exactly where they are.
woodle links to what you already have — the lab drive, institutional OneDrive, Google Drive, a departmental share — and keeps the record of what it was, who made it and what was claimed from it. It doesn't need to become the place your data lives.
- Your originals
- Stay where they are, byte for byte
- Leaving
- Export everything, any time, no request
- Held by us
- Only what you ask us to keep
Link or keep
The file stays in your storage. woodle holds the reference, the checksum and the history.
No second copy, no second bill, nothing to migrate. Your institution's rules about where research data sits keep applying, because the data never moved.
Anything a published claim rests on can be copied and held, so the evidence can't quietly disappear.
A linked file can be moved or deleted by someone who doesn't know what it was underneath. For the handful of files that matter most, that's not a risk worth taking.
Keeping a copy uses your storage, so it's always your decision, one file at a time, with the size in front of you.
Storage-only products make you move everything and pay for the privilege. Link-only products can't promise the evidence will still be there. You choose per study which files are worth holding — everything else just stays put.
Where it can point
The places research files actually sit, in the order labs tend to use them.
Your own computer
Still the most common place research data lives. A watched folder on your laptop or desktop.
A departmental NAS or share
The lab drive everyone maps on Monday morning.
Institutional OneDrive and SharePoint
What most universities now provide, and where IT would rather your data stayed.
Google Drive
Personal or institutional Workspace.
The instrument PC
Including machines that aren’t on the network. Copy off, drop in.
An external disk
The one in the drawer with four years of runs on it.
woodle’s own storage
If you’d rather not think about it. An allowance comes with every plan, including free.
A watched folder, a share and the instrument PC are what founding labs start on, because they need nothing from your IT department. OneDrive, SharePoint and Google Drive follow. Box, Dropbox, Zoho WorkDrive and object stores are further out and handled case by case. Tell us what your lab uses and we’ll tell you plainly where it sits in that order — including if the answer is “not soon”.
Institutional storage stopped being unlimited.
Google and Microsoft both capped what universities get, and institutions responded by rationing researchers down to a fixed allowance each. Meanwhile a single imaging session can fill it.
Which is why woodle is careful not to make it worse. Linking costs you nothing against your quota, and nothing against ours — the only files that take up space are the ones you deliberately decide are worth keeping.
If you stop paying, nothing moves.
Linked files were never ours to hold. What woodle keeps — the record, the history, the claims and what they rest on — exports whole, in formats that open without us.
Your files can stay where they are.
Which is easiest to prove with your own storage in front of you. Tell us what your lab uses and we will say plainly whether it is in the first wave.