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Transcript 11

I don’t know that I’m exemplary on the way that I keep my files but keeping back-ups is obviously always pretty important and in my early days I had a pretty bad disaster with... well it was when you still kept things on floppy discs and although I had two copies I kept them in the same room and one day a cleaner came in and there was a waterheater in this room and they left it on and the thermostat wasn’t working and the whole room got filled with intense steam and all the discs, kind of, turned to sog because they’ve got cardboard in the middle and that was quite a lot of months of data that just went in one go so it’s not...

I mean you could have the equivalent of this if you’d got it all on the one computer and you have some such a cataclysmic thing so keeping stuff in different places... I mean, that’s less of an issue now that you’ve got the web and, you know, people keep stuff in a cloud or whatever but it’s still worth thinking about. It’s amazing how... I mean I only backup my stuff once a week because I personally don’t use a managed desktop so it’s not backed up every day and then there might be the odd week when I don’t do it so... you know, that’s bad practice.

Actually as well I’m not careful about checking backups. I think you can’t always assume that these backup softwares work and I have heard horror stories sometimes about people believing their stuff was backed up and then when they really needed it they found that actually not everything they thought was backed up was backed up so I think it is very important to really understand your software and I’m not always as good as I should be on that because it’s kind of on my conscience this issue at the moment because I’m using a backup program that is relatively new because I’ve got one of those new external drives so yes, lot’s to think about there I think.

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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