Remote Data Access

General

Data acquired on instruments in CIF is archived in several ways, depending upon the instrument.  Much of the archived data makes its way into networked storage managed by IT Services.  Within the cloud you will find the directory for your major professor, leading to directories for each researcher in the group, leading to directories for each instrument, leading to actual data files.

You cannot write to data files while they are in the cloud; reprocessing data will require you to copy the files to your local computer.  Connect to data storage as a network drive then simply drag and drop the files to your local PC or Mac. (MNova softare does not require write access to process data, so you will be able to process data without copying it to your computer.)  If you have recently started at Iowa State or joined a new research group, you may not be authorized to access the CIF Research Data cloud, and you will need contact Sarah Cady to gain authorization. 

The procedures for accessing the CIF Research Data Cloud are discussed in this PDF

Procedures for reprocessing previously acquired data will vary from instrument to instrument. Please speak with the appropriate CIF staff person to discuss your personal needs for data archival, retrieval, and reprocessing. 

 

X-ray Single Crystal Structure Determination

All single-crystal x-ray diffraction final results are available in the CIF Research cloud. The full framesets are typically very large files and they are archived on DVD's. If you would like to have a copy of framesets, please send a request to Arkady Ellern

X-ray Powder Diffraction

Data acquired on the Rigaku powder diffractometer is available in the CIF Research cloud.  Copies of files are also kept locally on the Rigaku operation PC. You may also want to copy your data to your flash USB drive in ASCII (text) format as the size of all resulting files is very small.

NMR Data

Once NMR data has been acquired, we encourage users to process their data using MNova or Topspin on one of the three processing stations in Hach Hall or one in Gilman Hall. This reduces wait time for other users when instrumentation is busy. Your data will be instantly available at the processing station once you save it on the spectrometer computer. All data acquired on the NMRs is kept locally for at least a year.  Your files are also moved to the CIF Research Data cloud as soon as you log out of the NMR. This allows you to access data from your office, lab or home computer. In order to process your data, you will need to install MNova and obtain a copy of our site license or install another suitable NMR processing software on your computer. 

  • Click here to download a PDF containing information on how to access the CIF Research Data cloud. If you have recently started at Iowa State or joined a new research group, you may not be authorized to access the CIF Research Data cloud, and you will need contact Sarah to gain authorization. 
  • If you had a previous version of MNova or MNova Lite installed (included with Chem Office Suite) please uninstall before proceeding with the installation of the full version. 
  • The full version of the MNova software can be downloaded from the MNova website. Installation instructions for PC and Mac can be found on the MNova website.
  • The MNova site license and activation instructions are available here or by emailing Sarah.

Mass Spec Data

All Mas Spec data is archived on the cloud. 

Other Instruments

Data from the various spectrophotometers (IR, UV-Vis, CD, EPR) is archived on the cloud. The processing software for these datasets may or may not be available to install on your own PC. There are also open-source softwares available for processing. 

Elemental Analysis data (CHN/S Analyzer) will be emailed to you in Excel file format once your analyses have been completed.