Data management
Find a place to put your research data. Don’t lose it. Keep it secure.
Carefully considering your research data management early can save you a lot of headaches later. For example, your data storage location is critical. It needs to be three things:
- Reliable
- Backed up
- Secure
Reliability
It’s advisable to synchronise a copy of your research data to a cloud service. Cloud providers host data on servers with ‘failover redundancy’, meaning if one server ever fails, another is ready to take its place instantly. This is how they can advertise ‘99.999% uptime’.
- Cloudstor: powered by AARNet (The Australian Academic Research Network) and provides students and researchers with a Terabyte of free, ultra-fast storage. It’s easy to set up and works just like Dropbox.
Warning: AARNet has advised that it is decommissioning its Cloudstor service at the end of 2023. If you have data stored there you should investigate an alternative storage location.
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OneDrive: 1TB of space is provided to you by Griffith. Integrates with other Microsoft 365 services.
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Google Drive: Everyone knows this one.
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Dropbox: Everyone knows this one too.
Our recommendation: Microsoft OneDrive
Since Cloudstor is being decommissioned, our recommendation is to use OneDrive. You get a lot of space and it integrates with your Griffith account. Microsoft’s Australian data is stored in data centers in Sydney so it is subject to Australian data protection laws.
Backup
You should run a backup tool in addition to the services above. Your best, most secure option is to backup both to a physical hard drive and to an online service.
Remember: sync is not the same as backup!
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Griffith Research Storage: built on the same technology as Cloudstor and is very fast. Research Vault is available for you to store data you are no longer actively using. Here is a handy questionnaire to help you decide Griffith Research Storage can help you.
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Arq Backup: use Arq to back your computer up to your Cloudstor or to your OneDrive. It’s not free, but the $50 license is less than the cost of a hard drive and makes backing up completely automatic.
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Backblaze: popular, paid.
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RSync: RSync is a command-line tool for syncing local folders with an external hard drive or network drive.
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Time Machine (Mac)
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Windows Backup (Windows 10)
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Drag-and-drop (the worst option)
Our recommendation: Your operating system
The best backup is the one you will use. That means set-and-forget is best. Buy a simple external hard drive and leave it plugged in to your computer, or place a weekly calendar reminder to plug it in. Let the operating system do the rest.