# Container templates

LABDRIVE allows you to define **container templates**, that can be used to define how the content is going to be managed in the containers created  associated to them including:

* **The content source for the container:** When creating a new container, LABDRIVE can copy the content from another data container into it. This is useful if you want to define a template or a pre-defined folder structure for it.
* **Container metadata schema:** The available set of fields to describe a container.
* **Items metadata schema:** The available set of fields to describe the items inside a container (files and folders).
* **Workflow:** The workflow to use to handle the container.
* **Storage:** The type and class of storage to use for the content that is placed in the container.
* **Check-in/out policy:** That defines if you want to allow multiple users to work simultaneously over a data container or not.
* **Quota:** The storage space you would like to assign to the container.

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At the archival node level, you can define the templates that are going to be available to the users when creating new data containers in a given archival node. This way, if you want to enforce a certain policy for a certain group of experiments, you can create a node and associate a certain policy to it, that enforces the use of certain metadata fields for instance.

To define a container template: 

1. Go to **Configuration** 
2. Then select **Data container templates**. 

When the template has been created, you can associate it to an archival node in the Configuration menu under the Archival Structure option.