Storage in a few words

Storage of research data means recording them for current (re)use, now or in the near future. It is therefore active data and backups that take place during the research. When the project is over, it is no longer storage, but archiving or long-term preservation.

Good practice for storage

In general, you should always store three copies of your data:

  1. the original
  2. a copy kept on a local external device
  3. a copy kept on an external device at a different location

This allows you to restore files from a backup, and to ensure that you can recover an earlier or identical version of the data if necessary.

It is important to include metadata and readme.txt files in your backups.

10 simple rules for data storage!

"This article describes ten simple rules for digital data storage that grew out of a long discussion among instructors for the Software and Data Carpentry initiatives. Software and Data Carpentry instructors are scientists from diverse backgrounds who have encountered a variety of data storage challenges and are active in teaching other scientists best practices for scientific computing and data management. Thus, this paper represents a distillation of collective experience, and hopefully will be useful to scientists facing a variety of data storage challenges."

Edmund M. Hart, Pauline Barmby, David LeBauer, François Michonneau, Sarah Mount, Patrick Mulrooney, Timothée Poisot, Kara H. Woo, Naupaka B. Zimmerman, Jeffrey W. Hollister, in: PLOS, Published: October 20, 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005097