Reason for deprecation of CIFS and migrating to Google Drive
The CIFS drive has reached end-of-life and to reduce the high costs associated with hardware replacement, operation, maintenance, and data back-up, the IT Division is retiring this CIFS drive at the end of the calendar year 2018.
The Labs investment in Google Drive, with its unlimited storage announced at Labtech 2015, and cloud file sharing capabilities makes it an ideal replacement for most CIFS file storage and sharing scenarios.
Alternatives
To replicate the functionality of a mounted local network drive like CIFS, we recommend installing Google Drive for desktop application (Windows and Mac compatible).
For Windows and Mac users, the following instructions for copying your files from your CIFS/SMB home drive (aka H Drive) to Google Drive.
For Linux users, the web interface of Google Drive is the only supported method for accessing Google Drive at this time, but there are open source solutions such as rclone or you can write your own application using the Google Drive API.
The Google Drive web interface of Google Drive is also supported for Windows, Mac and Linux users.
