Research Guides
Keep your files, photos, research data, manuscripts, and other valuable digital items safe, with a comprehensive backup plan.
Some files can be replaced with time, effort, and money, but others are irreplaceable. Backing up your files ensures you don't need to redo work or lose irreplaceable memories or documents.
Everyone! Students, researchers, instructors, writers, parents with lots of photos of their kids, etc.
Everything you want to keep. If you're not sure, include it. Make sure to check the storage locations for any program you use that creates its own databases (such as Zotero or EndNote for citation management). You want to be sure that you are backing up the location where those programs store your data.
Use the 3-2-1 rule to guide where (and how many copies) you need to keep your files safe.
Three copies can include your original file (the one you work with on your main computer). Two additional backups are then needed, which brings us to "two media". This could be your main computer and two external hard drives (three copies, two media: one is the computer hard drive and the other media type is external hard drive). Finally, one should be off-site or remote. Many of us store at least some files in "The Cloud" (services such as OSF, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, network drives on campus). Your cloud files can be your off-site ones, but you can also have an external hard drive located remotely.
When picking your remote storage location, consider the types of natural disasters in your area. If you live in an area with regional natural disasters such as wildfires or hurricanes, a cloud or external drive in another region is probably wise.
MacOS, Windows, and Linux all have software that can automate back-ups, often faster than "copy and paste", to external storage.
When choosing your media types, remember that USB drives (also known as flash drives or jump drives) are not designed for long-term storage. Something is better than nothing, but please use an external hard drive if financially feasible. If your work is based out of a research group, talk to the faculty or group manager about purchasing external hard drives available for project files on the grant or project funding.
Cloud services such as OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, and others store your files remotely. Many sync automatically, which can be helpful unless you make a local mistake and the mistake overwrites the remote file. Storage such as Open Science Framework and GitHub that require you to manually "push" or upload your changes can lower the risk of accidentally syncing a mistake.
For research with sensitive data (HIPPA protected, IRB protocols, and more), talk to an OU Libraries Information Specialist about how to suitably back up and protect sensitive data. Most granting agencies now require a Data Management Plan and many allow backup costs to be included in the grant budget.
Consider the Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How of backups to answer the questions following each case study. Click on the questions following the case study to see some suggestions.
Rike is an assistant professor in the English Department. She is working on several novels and short stories in addition to materials that she creates for the courses she teaches. She keeps most of her files on her desktop for easy access but she is always worried about accidentally deleting them. To alleviate these fears she makes a point to copy the entire contents of her desktop directly into the documents section of her computer so that she can recover the previous day’s work if she accidentally deletes it.
Kayin is an undergraduate student majoring in Psychology. They have heard horror stories about other students losing their work so they make a point to keep all of their class materials in their favorite cloud storage folder, that way there is always a copy of them should something happen. They also have started doing research in a lab and have created a separate folder to keep the data and results from their research in the cloud as well.
Eser is a graduate student in the Engineering Department. His work frequently involves manuscripts, code and scripts, and 3D renderings that take a several hours each to process. Eser works primarily on lab computers in his department that have the processing power to do his work. He is paranoid that something will go wrong with those computers so he always works off his flashdrive so he can take his data home with him. Occasionally he will copy the output of his work over to his personal laptop to have a copy there to work with when he is away from the computer lab.