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Writing a data management plan: activity - storage and backups

Take a couple of minutes to think about the question given below and make a note of your answer. Then, click the question to compare your notes with the feedback provided.

What do you think would be the advantages of storing your data on the central, or school networked drives?

Keeping backups is probably the most important data management task. There is a real risk of losing data through hard drive failure or accidental deletion.It is therefore recommended that you keep at least 3 copies of your data, for example, original, external (locally), and external (remotely), and have a policy for maintaining regular backups.

When considering your backup strategy you need to know:

  • How will you back up your data?
  • How regularly will backups be made?
  • Whether all data, or only changed data, will be backed up. (A backup of changed data is known as an "incremental backup", while a backup of all data is known as a "full backup").
  • How often full and incremental backups will be made.
  • How long will backups be stored.
  • How much hard drive space or number of Digital Video Discs (DVDs) will be required to maintain this backup schedule.
  • If the data is sensitive, how will they be secured and (possibly) destroyed.
  • What backup services are available that meet these needs and, if none, what will be done about it.
  • Who will be responsible for ensuring backups are available.

Important! To ensure that your backup system is working properly, you should regularly restore your data files from your backups and check that you can read them.

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Creative Commons Licence
PILOT - Writing a data management plan by Edina, University of Edinburgh modified by Marion Kelt, GCU is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://datalib.edina.ac.uk/mantra/introduction.html