After hearing horror stories about grad students losing years of work when their laptop is stolen, I've decided it would be prudent to come up with a plan for backing up my data and stick to it. I don't have much to back up at this point so it will all fit on my 1 GB flash drive.
Every Friday when I come home I will copy my folder labeled "Grad School" onto my flash drive, replacing the previous version from the week before. The flash drive will stay at home in a place where I don't think a thief would look. I should only need the flash drive if something awful happens to my computer.
The obvious problem with this plan is that everything is lost if the apartment burns down with my computer and flash drive in it. Maybe later I'll get a second flash drive to keep at school.
I can also back up documents more regularly if I choose, but at minimum I'll do it once a week. I'll probably also come up with a system for backing things up online later.
Do you have a system for backing up your data? What is it?
2 comments:
Hiya -
Consider asking the tech people at your school about server space... usually students are alloted a certain amount of storage space on a university server. This can make a really nice place to back things up, as universities typically have pretty reliable methods for backing up their servers, and you wouldn't have to worry about theft/fire.
All my data is backed up on the departamental server, but I also save files to my thumb drive and transfer it between my home and school computers. After working with GIS data, the 1 GB thumbdrive isn't big enough to hold all my research data, manuscripts, pdfs, etc. I'm wondering if I should get a "traveling" harddrive?
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