By Claire
Now before anyone starts to panic, it’s ok. I haven’t lost anything. But I was reminded of the importance of backing up your thesis work when I saw this twitter post via Linkedin (shown to the right).
This post feeds into a paranoia I have that somehow my PhD thesis and data are going to go missing. At the moment, I am carrying my laptop with me everyday to and from work. My laptop contains my academic life, all my data, all my readings, all my reports. Everything. I am paranoid that it will get dropped, or damaged while I am moving it around, or I’ll be mugged on the way home one night (because we all know that’s what happens to tourists in New York…)
Unfortunately, lost work is not that uncommon. I used to work in a call centre for a computer repair company. My job was to take calls and book in technicians to go out and fix the client’s computer problems. I still vividly remember the day a completely distraught girl called up our office asking about data recovery from a USB stick. Apparently her masters thesis was due in two weeks and she had been saving it to a USB stick, when she accidentally bumped the USB and the memory stick was corrupted and she lost everything saved on there. To say she was upset would be an understatement. Turns out that her laptop hard drive, which contained the original version of her thesis had burnt out, causing her to lose all her masters work to date. The USB stick version was the second attempt at writing up the thesis, which was now also lost. She had learnt her lesson from the first time and rather than save her thesis to her hard drive, she was instead using a USB. In my crazed effort to help her out I discovered that data recovery from USBs is next to impossible and she would likely never be able to recover her work.
Having heard so many horror stories of lost work, I personally take a more paranoid approach. I have backups of my thesis and data in various locations, both locally and remotely. Prior to travelling to New York, I uploaded a copy of all my thesis work so far to an online data server called DropBox (I highly recommend everyone sets up and account here. It’s free and you can access the contents from anywhere there is internet).
I know there are plenty of stories out there of lost essays, missing reports and corrupted data. Share them in the comments below, as well as the measures that you use to ensure your work is safe.
OnCirculation 
Apr 26, 2013 at 10:11
Can’t agree more Claire, personally I back-up to both dropbox and a physical hard drive which I take home every night, as well as the RSES back-up system, which backs up every night.
However all data is also stored on my PC, having one copy on a usb is not backing up.
Apr 26, 2013 at 11:43
Dropbox dropbox dropbox. It has saved my bacon on many an occasion. That and I share a separate account with my supervisor so that we can share data, and I have a folder that I also share with my office mate so that we can always have an easy way to send things to one another (seeing that I travel so much!). ALso whenever I do travel and accidentally leave things on my desk top Aimee just pops them in to my drop box and I can access them wherever I may be. BUT don’t forget this doesn’t help you if you don’t regularly save your work, and the bloody program crashes…..had that happen too. Devastating.
Apr 30, 2013 at 11:53
I recommend against DropBox purely because anything you upload to their servers is technically theirs. So any confidential material, instantly becomes their confidential material.
What you should do instead is have a secure backup process. There are many tools out there ranging from Apple’s Time Machine to Windows Backup. Or there are speciality providers like CrashPlan and BackBlaze.
I use CrashPlan, I use the software to backup to an external drive and I also use their Cloud backup option too. The Cloud does cost money but you can use their software for free to backup to a friend’s computer.
You should always have two forms of backup. Locally and offsite. And you should always test your backups. Do a restore occasionally to make sure it is actually working. Never assume it will work! Test, test, and test.
And if you do go with the Cloud option with CrashPlan, you can get the Android/iOS app that lets you pull down any file you have backed up, to your phone, or you can share it. So it is like DropBox, except for your whole computer.
Apr 30, 2013 at 12:08
Dropbox, or other commercial data providers like that, are good though one has to be careful with the terms of service of them… I’m a bit of a nerd so I have a few different options: couple of external drives to carry information, for non-critical things there’s some stuff on google drive (or various versions I’ve emailed around) and I maintain a couple of my own webpages which have a few gigabytes available, so I store important things in not accessible locations on there, too. That last one’s a bit nerdy for most people, though.
The creator of Linux once said “Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)”. I guess that’s an option for some work ;).
One of the biggest losses out of the change to more iPhones etc is that the older iPods were great as backup devices. I had a few versions, the last one that I had which could be used as an external drive I had setup into a few gigs for music, and the other 150 odd gb was dedicated to work stuff. I was doing a lot of work travel then, though, and I love getting to chill out with my music so it made sense because it was a backup tool I had with me.
That said, I was once caught out when someone broke into my house and stole my laptop and the only external drive I was using as a backup tool at the time. That sucked. I lost about 6 months of personal photos and a few documents I didn’t have stored anywhere else.
The other thing I do is rotate backup media – external drives are unreliable, so I tend to buy a new one every year or so and move things around, and retire (but retain) the old one. I’ve recovered things from older backup stuff when I’ve needed to: important, cause I’ve got some early uni work, circa 1999-2000, which I have sometimes referred to :).
Ultimate story behind this post: diversity is the key to a good backup strategy. Cloud stuff is great as it’s added to the toolkit as it adds diversity but it’s one of several things.
May 1, 2013 at 12:40
Hello, just wanted to say, I enjoyed this article. It was practical. Keep on posting!