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Transcript 10

One of the things that I think is commonly observed and actually it’s quite sad and it reflects why I think that thinking carefully about how you gather your data and how you store it, how you manage is that stories of post-grad students losing all of their data, all of their thesis etc., at late stages and it being the only copy that existed. It convinces me that you have to think carefully about the disaster if you like; what happens if my hard-drive dies, what happens if I lose this USB stick. I have recorded these lectures at a location away from my university, and I am carrying this data recorder home – hours and hours of research data sitting on that – how do I protect myself against those losses and some of that of course actually is the backup question, ‘Do you regularly back up?’

But you have to think about backup not just in terms of from this computer on to some store somewhere but from this device on which I have gathered my precious research materials on to something else so that I’ve got a duplicate. So I think that there are some questions that you should always ask yourself about how well am I covered against unexpected losses: my baggage goes missing as I fly home or, you know, I lose the USB stick on my way home, where is the spare copy? Because it’s those incidents I think that a PhD student would find very demoralizing and, of course, actually it may have a significant impact on time, from their point of view, because redoing work could be very difficult, sometimes not possible, so there are some very practical aspects to research data management which are just about the nitty-gritty of making sure that if a disaster strikes it isn’t actually a disaster.

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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