Graduate Student Research Support

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To safeguard your important data assets, remember both storage and backup are essential.

• A granting agency may require you to retain data for a given period and may ask you to explain in a data plan how you will store and back it up.
• Storing and backing up your data ensures that it will be there when you need to use it for publications, theses, or grant proposals.
• Good preservation practices help make your data available to researchers in your lab/research group, department, or discipline in the future.

What should you backup?

• Everything that would be required to restore data in event of loss (data/software/scripts/documentation)

How many copies?

• Follow the Rule of 3: Original copy, second local copy, remote copy

How often?

• Backup frequency is dependent on the project and the data. Consider how much data you would be willing to lose.

What type?

• Full: Backup all files
• Incremental: Backup only files that have changed since last backup (either full or incremental)
• Differential: Backup only files that have changed since last full backup

Test your system: Go through the exercise of accessing backup functions to see that the procedure works & you can fully restore your data