Pg:data
Data Management
This is a "crowd-sourced" page for tips and best practice in (thesis) data management techniques. See here for a typical disaster no-one would ever wish to experience. Please feel free to contribute by logging in and adding to the items below.
Laptop Backups
Laptops are the most ubiquitous hardware for assembling a thesis or research article. Most (Mac Airbook excepted) contain moving parts which wear out, most obviously the hard drive. Unfortunately, the HD is also a smaller version of the desktop form factor, and put simply, it wears out faster (it can reach 70-80° inside a laptop casing). So if you are reading this now, ask yourself when you last made a full backup of its contents, or when the last incremental backup was made. There are various ways of achieving a backup.
- Burn a DVD. If you are writing a thesis, do this daily!
- Attach an external hard drive (via USB, Firewire, or even Thunderbolt cable) and run backup software to back up hourly. On Macs for example, this could be via the system TimeMachine option.
- Mac users (Lion ) will shortly have the option of syncing up to 5 Gbyte of data onto iCloud. More details to follow. There are plenty of cloud options for Windows users.
- Or you could even use your H drive, which is backed up nightly and available worldwide. Many groups also buy additional central storage space
- ICT offer a laptop backup service (at cost).
- Run a Laptop health check periodically. At least, check your hard drive using a SMART utility (this is the one I use for a Mac laptop).
- Keep the HD (nd laptop) cool by running the fans faster than normal. I use smcFanControl which has fast fans if you are using a power adaptor and slower (but still faster than default) for battery operation. I have done this for five years on one laptop and thus far its worked in the sense that the original HD is still running and showing no SMART errors.
Bibliographic Managers
- Mendeley.
