The Importance of Backups.

[LystAP]

Read this article today (http://gma.yahoo.com/blogs/abc-blogs/rutgers-student-offers-1-000-data-stolen-laptop-100113953.html), immediately felt for him and.... uploaded my own research data on to Google Drive and a number of USB drives I have around.

 

I already had my data on two USB drives I normally carry around, but perhaps redundancy is better when it comes to your life's work. It seems like common sense, but it doesn't really hit home until you see it happen. Anyone know other similar (and cheap) means of data storage?

 

Here's the picture of the actual advertisement in the article.

 

Edited April 27, 2013 by LystAP

[memyselfandcoffee]

i have everything backed up on dropbox at the moment, might add another backup to my list after reading that.

[iamjacksgoat]

I backup a lot of my files on Google Drive, and my university offers every student a Box account, so I use that as well.  I use Google Drive instead of USB drives now, because I've had horrible luck with those breaking on me.  

[TakeruK]

Backing up your stuff is essentially important!! You might think "well, I'm super careful with my laptop, I won't lose it!" and while that may be true, there are lots of other ways you can lose your data. For example, the hard drive could just decide to just die / fail one day. This actually happened to my work computer a few weeks ago -- it was five years old and apparently hard drives tend to fail after 5-10 years. Fortunately, my department backs everything up automatically on all of its computers, so the IT people were able to restore it to exactly the condition I had it minutes before the failure  

 

In my 6 years of doing research, I've experienced at least 3 hard drive failures where important stuff would have been lost if they were not backed up. I've also almost lost important files because of accidentally deleting the wrong directory etc. If you are in a computational intensive department, you probably have dedicated IT staff that maintains all of the computers in the department so it's a good idea to talk to them to learn how your data is backed up -- sometimes only certain parts of a computer is backed up regularly, so you should be sure to store an extra copy of critical stuff there!

 

Personally, in addition to the regular backup done by my department's IT people, I store an extra copy of critical code in my Dropbox (both for safety and convenience -- it allows me to access my code to explain it to people without needing to be at my workstation). I also store my homework / coursework / any papers I'm writing on Dropbox so it says synchronized and allows me to work anywhere. For everything else, (e.g. raw data) I generally do not keep that stuff on my laptop -- I can remotely access my work computers from my laptop if I need to work while away from school. 

 

I would also recommend asking your PI to buy you an external hard drive. It was one of the first things I asked for when I started my MSc! They are relatively cheap now, you can probably get 2 TB for about $100 and it's well worth the investment for your research group, considering that it probably cost them many orders of magnitude more to get that data in the first place!! (Someone told me that the big telescopes effectively cost about $1 per second to run, so even just one night of data is effectively worth about $36000).

[TeaGirl]

Dropbox. I save all my day to day work that I can't afford to lose on dropbox. I back up my entire laptop on 2 different external drives and update every few months. I had a near miss virus thing with my MS thesis once but luckily I was able to live-boot with a linux CD and recover all my data. I'm very careful about backing stuff up now.

[biotechie]

I agree. Backups are the best. Had I not backed up to my external hard drive right before my hard drive crashed a couple of days ago, I would have lost my thesis. Have two backups on externals. One with just the files I need, and one with my entire system. Luckily I had the second because I don't think I could have gotten all of my programs back the other way, and I'd lost my OSX boot disk.

 

I don't back up the cloud, but I make sure to have a couple of backup copies on externals. I also send copies to myself via e-mail and copies of data and my writing to my professors.

 

I also keep a copy of linux around; I've had to go in and get friends' data a few times. Luckily I haven't had to do that with mine! Start backing up from the first day you put things on your computer. You will be happy you did one day!

Edited May 12, 2013 by biotechie

[fuzzylogician]

Note of caution: if you have shared folders in dropbox, back them up regularly to non-shared folders or to an offline device (or better: both). Co-authors (read: old, non tech-savvy professors) may inadvertently cause harm to your shared content. They may not realize that dragging something to a local folder means it's deleted from the shared folder and they may not fully understand how the sharing works inside sub-folders of your shared folder. I've had to restore shared work, several times, because someone accidentally moved stuff around and re-arranged their own work directories without realizing it would affect my account as well. No one meant any harm, but if I hadn't had backups it would have meant that some work would have been lost.

[rising_star]

Also, if you're being paranoid, you shouldn't keep the external backups in the same place. For example, if your external HD is with your laptop and both get stolen, you might be screwed. I shared an office with someone that backed up at work to a flash drive which lived in the office and at home to an external HD, which she put in a fireproof safe.

[nugget]

Backups are so important. You just never know what could happen. I saw a poster at school once from someone looking for her stolen laptop. She went to the washroom, was at the stall and put her laptop near her feet on the floor. The person in the next stall reached under and grabbed her computer while she was on the toilet.. Just terrible. One can never be too careful when it comes to safeguarding and backing up data. Anything could happen to it.

[juilletmercredi]

I feel really bad for him/her.  There are so many copies of my dissertation data (it's part of a larger study from my lab) floating around that if I lost my computer, I'd only have to ask my advisor for it.  I would probably have to recreate some variables, but that would be like an extra week of work.  I also have it stored on a flash drive I never take anywhere (I have also had bad luck with flash drives breaking on me) and backed up on an 2 TB external hard drive that is not portable and never leaves my desk, along with every thing else on my computer.  I have a Mac so I simply set up Time Machine with that HDD and it's continually plugged into my laptop.

 

I am paranoid.

 

At my medical center we are not allowed to store data on Google Drive or Dropbox.  However, all of my other files are stored on Google Drive - I purchased 25 GB of storage space and all of my proposal drafts, drafts of research papers, etc., are on Google Drive.  It has the added benefit of being able to edit it from any computer.

 

Also, jenste, I am always afraid that someone is going to do that - reach under my stall and snatch my bag from the floor near my feet in the toilet.  I usually try to hang it up, but sometimes there's no hanger.