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Writing a data management plan: time to reflect

In thinking about your planned research, consider what software dependencies you have and what risks are involved with these dependencies.

  • Can you think of a way to reduce the risk to the longevity of your research outputs by using or saving to another format? Can you see a reason you might have to migrate your work to another file format before your research is finished?
  • If you are using proprietary software for your research, how likely is it that the company will change hands sometime soon? Is there an option to export a portable format? Should that be included in your data management plan?
  • Have you familiarised yourself with any discipline-specific data standards there may be in your field?

At some point you may choose to compress your data files for the purpose of local or networked storage, transportation or transmission. This is called bit-rate reduction, which involves encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation.

  • Zip (.zip) is a de facto standard compression format that is used on Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Unix platforms, though there are others, sometimes specific to a particular operating system. A self-executing zip file (.exe) should not be used if the file is to be decompressed on another operating system. Zip is a "lossless" type of compression, which means the file should be identical to the original once unzipped. There are also "lossy" types of compression associated with some multimedia file formats, which may result in some distortion or loss of quality or fidelity when played.
  • Tar (tape archive) files are commonly used in Unix or Linux to bundle a set of files into one. Tar files may also be zipped to reduce the filesize (.tar.Z or tar.gz or .tar.bz2). In Windows environments the zip file can be used for the same purpose - to bundle files together, with or without compression, or with more or less compression. Utilities for tar files in Windows also exist.

Losses can be one trade-off of compression. Another is the processing time it takes to compress or decompress before or during use, or the amount of computing resource this takes, in the case of very large files or shared servers.

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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